The trouble is, we women have all along been set down on the world’s program for a part so different from the one we really play upon its stage. For instance, the program reads: “Woman will take the part of Queen in the Drama of Society,” but often times, before the curtain falls, the stage reveals her as a dressmaker, a school teacher, perchance that most abused of mortals, a reformer! The program reads: “This august actress will be escorted to the stage by Man, her loyal and devoted subject, to whom has been assigned the part of shielding her from the glare of the footlights, and shooting anybody in the audience who dares to hiss.” But, alas! ofttimes the stage reveals her coming in alone, dragging her own sewing machine, while her humble and devoted subject, with tailor’s goose in one hand and scissors in the other, indicates by energetic pantomime his fixed intention to drive her speedily behind the scenes. The program, my beloved innocents, attires you all in purple and fine linen and bids you fare sumptuously every day, but not infrequently the stage reveals you attired in calico gowns, and munching your hard-earned crackers and cheese. The world’s theory furnishes every young lady that draws breath, with a lover, loyal and true, but the world’s practice shoots him on the battlefield, or poisons him with alcohol and nicotine until he can only “rattle around” through life in the place God meant him to fill within home’s sacred sanctuary. It is just this discrepancy that I complain of, and the generous age we live in is complaining of it with a thousand tongues, so that “the logic of events” that happen, instead of events that ought to happen, is impelling toward nobler fortunes that phenomenal creature whom a French author has called “the poor woman of the nineteenth century.” Naturally enough, in thinking over the “case,” I contrast your aims in life with what were once my aims, your outlook upon life with mine. The other day—a rainy one, you may be sure—I brought from the vasty deep of the family garret some of my girlish journals, which I was curious to compare with the diary of a friend and former pupil at Evanston. Let me give you a few parallel passages because of the lesson they teach. My pupil (aged sixteen) writes thus: “Was registered this day a member of the Freshman class in the Northwestern University. The president advises me to take the classical course, and I’ve made up my mind to try it.” From mine at fifteen years I read: “Caught a blue jay in my trap out in the hazel thicket. I knew he wasn’t “game” and let him go. The school house in our district is finished at last. A graduate of Yale College, and former tutor at Oberlin, is to be our teacher. I shall attend regularly, visiting my traps on the way.” Later: