"Graceful and young the peach-tree stands, Its foliage clustering green and full, This bride to her new home repairs, Her household will attend her rule." But remember that first she must become a mother. The brightest feature in the life of Chinese women, the one thing that brings them most comfort, is their boys. It is these which most surely lift women into a position of respect. And this is true, even though, according to the teaching of China's sages, the mother must be subject to her son as well as to her husband. "The one bright spot in the lives of Chinese women," an educated Chinaman has recently said, "is their resignation, their willingness to endure, to make the best of their circumstances." Indeed, of the Chinese as a race, this is true, though it is more emphatically true of the women. Certainly their lot is far harder than that of the men. From the cradle to the grave, in the view of one from the Occident, the Chinese woman's way is a dark and cheerless one. Few of the outer rays of the world's joy penetrate the seclusion of their lives. And while Chinese girls and women are amply capable of being made the intellectual and social equals of the opposite sex, the fact is they are not in any true sense companions of their brothers and husbands. It is the lack of training that makes the Chinese woman, as a rule, uncompanionable. There are exceptions, to be sure. In their present lack of real preparation for the wider sphere of womanly usefulness, it is doubtless well that the women have no larger freedom. Wherever the Western school has gone, however, there has been given to the girls of China an opportunity for a broader outlook upon life through education and training. "Of all others," says Confucius, in the _Analects_, "women servants and men servants are the most difficult people to have the care of. Approach them in a familiar manner, and they take liberties; keep them at a distance, and they grumble." These words throw some light, by way of illustration at least, upon woman's place in China as respects freedom to mingle with the outside world. The sex probably enjoys as much liberty as conditions justify. And yet keeping them from the world without does not tend to develop the most genial temperament; their faces do not evince cheerfulness or hope. What is the attitude of a Chinese husband toward his wife? Of course, she is regarded as his inferior; and, as a rule, she actually is. Because of the limitations which from infancy have everywhere been thrown about her life, it could not be otherwise. When the girls must be married off to get rid of the craving of another mouth; and when wives are largely looked upon as but a means of rearing children, that these may do the pious duties in behalf of the ancestral dead, it could not be expected that the idea of the equality of the sexes should ever be conceived.