A few years ago, an American woman of captivating address gained great reputation in Paris as a milliner. She had a profligate husband, whom she invited to tea every Sunday, supplying him at that time with a sum for his weekly expenses. In an evil day, seduced by promises of high patronage, she went to London. She was very successful; but in a few months her husband surprised her, seized all she possessed, and, turned adrift on the streets, she went back to a country where the law would protect her industry. Marriage has been sought only to legalize a theft,--to apply the words of Wendell Phillips, when "_union was robbery_." A respectable servant, who had laid by a considerable sum, was sought in marriage by an apparently suitable person. On the day before the marriage, she put her bank-book into his hands. After the ceremony, he said to her, "I am not well in health, and do not feel equal to supporting a family: you had better go back to service." Naturally indignant, she responded, "Give me, then, my bank-book."--"I am too feeble to spare the money," he replied. She went back to service, and has never seen him since; but, of course, she has been often obliged to change her name and residence to protect herself from a long succession of extortions. We see thus, that if a woman is able to conquer her fate, and to gain a livelihood in spite of a dissolute or incompetent husband, her home is not her own. Her husband's folly may, at any moment, deprive her children of bread. I have said that there was no woman so pitiable as an heiress. I said it advisedly. I thought of the long persecution she must bear from unwelcome suitors,--of all appreciation of her personality, ever so lovely or gifted or individual, sunk, as it must be, in the mire of her money. Mrs. Reid says, justly, that this money is not so much her own as a perquisite attached to her person for the benefit of her _future husband_; the larger portion of which will eventually pass to his heirs, whether of her blood or not. If forced from ill treatment to leave his roof, the law will return her but a scanty pittance. The nature of the law itself, and that estimate of woman on which it is based, are so identical, that we are compelled, as we turn over its pages, to treat these two points as one. "For one-half the human race," said Mrs. Reid years ago, "the highest end of civilization is to _cling_ like a weed upon a wall;" a curious instance of the power that the use of language has over a fact. There is nothing captivating in clinging like a "weed to a wall;" but most women are satisfied to hang like the "vine about the oak."