“I am trying tonic treatment, Emily; I am showing you a real danger; I am rousing you to flee from it. John is making money fast; there is no reason why he should always remain buried in this town. Use your influence as they do,--daily, hourly, constantly,--to predispose him to take you to another sphere. Do not always shrink and yield; do not conceal and assimilate and endeavor to persuade him and yourself that you are happy; do not put the very best face to him on it all; do not tolerate his relapses daily and hourly into his habitual, cold, inexpressive manner; and don’t lay aside your own little impulsive, out-spoken ways. Respect your own nature, and assert it; woo him, argue with him; use all a woman’s weapons to keep him from falling back into the old Castle Doubting where he lived till you let him out. Dispute your mother’s hateful dogma, that love is to be taken for granted without daily proof between lovers; cry down latent caloric in the market; insist that the mere fact of being a wife is not enough,--that the words spoken once, years ago, are not enough,--that love needs new leaves every summer of life, as much as your elm-trees, and new branches to grow broader and wider, and new flowers at the root to cover the ground.” “O, but I have heard that there is no surer way to lose love than to be exacting, and that it never comes for a woman’s reproaches.” “All true as Gospel, Emmy. I am not speaking of reproaches, or of unreasonable self-assertion, or of ill-temper,--you could not use any of these forces, if you would, you poor little chick! I am speaking now of the highest duty we owe our friends, the noblest, the most sacred,--that of keeping their own nobleness, goodness, pure and incorrupt. Thoughtless, instinctive, unreasoning love and self-sacrifice, such as many women long to bestow on husband and children, soil and lower the very objects of their love. _You_ may grow saintly by self-sacrifice; but do your husband and children grow saintly by accepting it without return? I have seen a verse which says,-- ‘They who kneel at woman’s shrine Breathe on it as they bow.’