But she will tell you, most likely, that she cannot cut out properly, that she has not the slightest taste for trimming, and that she was not brought up to dressmaking like a dressmaker. Ah, my dear sisters! are not these the days when we should all learn? _Men_ may go through life with the knowledge but of one thing--for if they are acquainted with the duties of their profession, they succeed--but women need to know _everything_, from putting on a poultice to playing the piano; and from being able to hold a conversation with the Lord Chancellor, to clear-starching their husbands’ neckties. I don’t say we must _do it_, but I maintain that we should know how. Men are really needed but in one place, and that is, public life; but we are wanted everywhere. In public and in private, upstairs and downstairs, in the nursery and the drawing-room,--nothing can go on properly without us; and if it does, if our husbands and our servants and our children don’t need us, we cannot be doing our duty. Above all, we have the training of the mistresses of future households, and the mothers of a coming generation--the bringing up, in fact, of the “girls of the next period.” If we cannot amend the faults we see in ourselves (an assertion which should be paradoxical to anyone gifted with the least energy), if we think it is too late to sit down in our middle age, and learn to rub the rust off our brains, and to work our heads with our fingers, we can rear them in a different fashion. If we are wasteful and extravagant and useless--deserving of all the hard things which have been said of us lately, let us at least take heed that our daughters are not the same. “MOTHER.”