We address ourselves then to women in easy circumstances. Can the head of a grand establishment, a wife, a mother, find time to study. Beyond a doubt, yes! To begin with, she can devote to study the time that other women give to worldly entertainments that consume their nights, and to personal adornments that devour their fortunes. They can lay aside all the pursuits that, while absorbing them without offering any advantage, prepare them ill for the duties toward their children that belong to them as mothers of immortal souls. Does not the secret of living lie in the reconciliation of apparent difficulties? Do not duties, tastes, affections often appear to contradict each other? I have often seen that habits of orderly activity combined with a simplicity that suppresses useless exactions multiply an industrious woman's hours and make it possible to meet every demand. It is a woman's science to understand how to give herself and yet reserve herself: a science composed of gentleness and activity, of devotion and firmness, whose first result is the retrenching of idle indulgences, and the keeping within due bounds the tribute to be paid to the claims of society. {225} In preceding writings I have shown in detail that there are more empty hours, even in a busy woman's life, than is supposed. When once her children are grown up, she has often too much liberty on her hands. I once knew a lady who had six children. Her two elder sons were at a boarding-school; her three daughters passed the whole day with their governess; even the youngest had his lesson hours. This lonely mother said to me mournfully on one occasion, "I pass the whole day alone with my sewing, and poor company it is;" and she was reduced, poor lady, to seeking outside distractions, innocent but futile. If she had had a taste for study and habits of industry, she would not have been driven from home. Study makes women love their homes, the attraction of work commenced always drawing them thither. How little need of visits and society such persons feel! It is a joy to steal off to one's room and continue one's reading or drawing. It is with a light step that one turns toward home when heart and life are filled with a love of study instead of with an immoderate, ruinous taste for dress and luxury. Much firmness, sweetness, and perseverance are necessary to secure one's liberty in a household, to make one's working hours respected, without failing in any other duty; in one word, to give and reserve one's self discreetly. It is a question of degree, like most other questions of conduct. But, in order to acquire courage for the struggle, women must be very sure that the right is on their side. They are too apt to mistake for a mere personal taste the duty of cultivating their mental faculties.