This is the day of trial for many things--among others, for the capacity of women for an enlarged sphere of action and more public exercise of power. Do women think they show their fitness for nobler duties than those already assigned them, by their impatience under censure, which is, after all, but one mode of teaching? Are they qualifying themselves to act in concert with men, by assuming an absolute moral supremacy which it is a kind of sacrilege to deny? If they think they are on the right road as at present followed, let them go on in heaven's name. When they have wandered sufficiently far perhaps they will have sense enough to turn back, and see for themselves what mistakes they have made and might have avoided, had they had the wisdom of self-knowledge in only a small degree. Certainly, so long as womanhood is held to confer, _per se_, a special and unassailable divinity, so long will women be rendered comparatively incapable of the best work through vanity, through ignorance, and through impatience of the teaching that comes by rebuke. Nothing is so damaging in the long run as exaggerated pretensions; for by-and-by, after a certain period of uncritical homage, the world is sure to believe that the silver veil which it has so long respected hides deformity, not divinity, and that what is too sacred for public use is too poor for public honour. If the faults of women are not to be discussed, nor their follies condemned, because womanhood is a sacred thing and a man naturally respects his mother and sisters, then women must be content to live in a moral harem, where they will be safe from both the gaze and the censure of the outside world; they must not come down into the battle-fields and the workshops, where they forfeit all claim to protection and have to accept the man's law of 'no favour.' It must be one thing or the other. Either their merits must be weighed and their capacity assayed in reference to the place they want to take--and in doing this their faults must be boldly and distinctly discussed--or they must be content with their present condition; and, with the mystic sanctity of their womanhood, they must accept also its moral seclusion--belonging, by their very nature, to things too sacred for criticism and too perfect for censure. It rests with themselves to decide which it is to be. _FEMININE AFFECTATIONS._