"'More shame to her!'" repeated the first speaker, as if she had been struck a sudden blow; and turning quickly towards the girl, beautiful, well educated, carefully reared, who, in the fulness of her twenty summers, found time for church-going, for clothing the poor, for elegant study, for every thing but sympathy,--"More shame!" she repeated: "What! for saving life and property?"--"Better that they should all have gone to the bottom," returned her friend, "than that one woman should step out of her sphere!" Ah! the Infinite Father knows how to educate the public opinion that we need. Now and then he lifts a woman, as he did Mary Patton, against her will out of her ordinary routine; and, while all the world gaze at her with tender sympathy, they half accept the coming future. Does it sadden you, that we should repeat such words? They did not shock the ears on which they fell; they met no farther rebuke than one astonished question. Yet what did they represent? Not the public opinion of Mary Patton. The New-York underwriters, when they voted her a thousand dollars, were a fit gauge of that. It was the public opinion of the "right of vocation" that the young girl unconsciously betrayed. Harsh words die on our lips, as we think, "This girl's life is aimless. _She_ would gladly do some noble work, but society does not help her. She lacks courage to stand alone, and envies the very woman she decries." "Public opinion is of slow growth," you retort: "do not charge its corruptions on the people of to-day." The people of to-day are responsible for any corruptions which they do not reject. We have seen that the standard of womanly education does not lead where it should, because controlled by a public opinion which demands too little. It becomes us here to investigate the origin of that public opinion, and to ask the meaning of the lives which have been lived in its despite. FOOTNOTES: [1] This does not mean the supervision of father and mother, but that into colleges, universities, medical schools, and whatever educational institutions may be named, the controlling and protecting influence of both sexes should be carried. I believe that every university should have a cultivated and elegant woman (not necessarily the _wife_ of any of its officers), whose duty it should be to preside over its social life, and offer such allurements to virtuous pleasure that gambling-houses and worse shall lose their present fascinations. If young men could associate with virtuous and lovely women, under suitable sanction, in their college life, they would not, in general, go out of it in search of the vicious and unlovely. No one who lives within three miles of a large university need doubt the meaning of this paragraph. An age and a religious faith which discards the cloister, should discard a cloisteral fashion, wherever it exists.