I have sometimes heard mothers say that they dreaded for their children faculties overstepping ordinary proportions, and that they should endeavor to repress them. "What use are they?" it is said: "How can a place be found for these great abilities in that real life, with its narrow, cramped limits, which begins for women at the close of their earliest youth?" These remarks have secretly shocked me. What! would you check the expansion of that fairest of divine works, a soul where God has implanted a germ of ideal life? You respect this gift in men, provided that it be employed in practical life, and that it serve to make money or create a social position. But, since the utility of great gifts is less lucrative among women, they had better be repressed! Then lop off the branches of the plant that craves too much air and room and sunlight; check the redundant sap. But the plant was intended to be a great tree, and you will make of it a stunted shrub. Take care lest the mutilation do not kill it utterly while torturing it. To extinguish a soul designed by God to shine is to bury therein the seed of an interior anguish that you will never cure, and which may exhaust the soul with vague, exaggerated aspirations. There is no torture comparable to the sense of the beautiful when it cannot find utterance, to the interior agony of a soul which, perhaps unconsciously, has missed its vocation. That word, expressive of a call from on high, of a solemn and irresistible claim, applies to women as well as to men, to the ideal life as much as to the external life. The soul is a thought of God, it has been said. There is a divine plan with regard to it, and our exertions or our languor advance or retard the execution of that plan, which exists none the less in God's wisdom and goodness, and must appear one day as our accuser if we fail to execute it. And to secure its accomplishment, the development of the whole soul, mind, and heart is necessary. It is difficult to discover in advance to what God destines his gifts; but none the less true is it that he destines them to an especial end, and that this providential vocation, faithfully answered, turns aside the dangers we dread to meet in its fulfilment.