Her husband held out his hand to her, and while they exchanged a loving pressure, Miss Maltby said: "Woman seems now to be treated as an independent rational being, whose one great object ought to be in this life to outstrip, or at any rate keep on a level with, the other sex in all intellectual pursuits. Did God put her into the world for this? Did he give her as a rule faculties and capacities for this? I cannot believe it. This ambition to shine, this thirst for excessive education, this craving after female university distinctions, why all this is eating out that which is truly womanly in hundreds of our girls, and turning them into a sort of intellectual mermaids, only one half women, and the other half something monstrous and unnatural. And what is the result? Let me read you the words of a high authority--Dr Richardson: `These precocious, coached-up children are never well,' he says. `Their mental excitement keeps up a flush which, like the excitement caused by strong drink in older children, looks like health, but has no relation to it.' And if this overtasking the mind is so injurious to the body, what will our women of the next generation be if things go on with us as they are doing at present? I must just quote again from the same authority. Dr Richardson says, `If women succeed in their clamour for admission into the universities, and like moths follow their sterner mates into the midnight candle of learning, the case will be bad indeed for succeeding generations; and the geniuses and leaders of the nation will henceforth be derived from those simple pupils of the Board schools who entered into the conflict of life with reading, writing, and arithmetic, free of brain to acquire learning of every kind in the full powers of developed manhood.'" "You make out a very gloomy case and prospect for us," said Mrs Prosser sadly and thoughtfully. "I do," replied the other; "and what makes all this far worse is, that this mental overwork cannot go on without depriving the sufferers--for they _are_ sufferers to an extent they little dream of--of that sweet privilege of being a true blessing to others which Christian mothers, daughters, and sisters enjoy, whose work inside, and moderately outside the home, is done simply, unostentatiously, and in a womanly manner. Verily, those women who sacrifice all to this mental forcing, to this race for intellectual distinction,--verily, they have their reward. But they can look for no other." "But stay, my dear friend," interposed Dr Prosser. "I have been going with you heart and soul, only I felt a little jolt just then, as if the wheels ran over a stone. Was not that last expression a little uncharitable? Will all women who covet and strive after intellectual honours be necessarily shut out of heaven?"