It is indisputable that the culture of the fine arts has something refining about it, and that our thoughts and acts are in the end impregnated with that which strikes our eyes. But the exercise of the arts and the contemplation of their products is a restricted privilege. It is not given to everyone to possess, to comprehend or to create fine things. Yet there is a kind of ministering beauty which may make its way everywhere--the beauty which springs from the hands of our wives and daughters. Without it, what is the most richly decorated house? A dead dwelling-place. With it the barest home has life and brightness. Among the forces capable of transforming the will and increasing happiness, there is perhaps none in more universal use than this beauty. It knows how to shape itself by means of the crudest tools, in the midst of the greatest difficulties. When the dwelling is cramped, the purse limited, the table modest, a woman who has the gift, finds a way to make order, fitness and convenience reign in her house. She puts care and art into everything she undertakes. To do well what one has to do is not in her eyes the privilege of the rich, but the right of all. That is her aim, and she knows how to give her home a dignity and an attractiveness that the dwellings of princes, if everything is left to mercenaries, cannot possess. Thus understood, life quickly shows itself rich in hidden beauties, in attractions and satisfactions close at hand. To be one's self, to realize in one's natural place the kind of beauty which is fitting there--this is the ideal. How the mission of woman broadens and deepens in significance when it is summed up in this: to put a soul into the inanimate, and to give to this gracious spirit of things those subtle and winsome outward manifestations to which the most brutish of human beings is sensible. Is not this better than to covet what one has not, and to give one's self up to longings for a poor imitation of others' finery? XII PRIDE AND SIMPLICITY IN THE INTERCOURSE OF MEN