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means.

only of his merits. In the married life, confidants are by no means desirable. You may be listened to with sympathy and interest;but will this redress your grievance? By no Therefore never complain of him. In the first place, you violate a sacred duty by exposing your husband's faults; and in the next, even a certain degree of female dignity should combine with better motives to prevent it.

I would also strongly recommend a concealment from others of any little discord or disunion which occurs between you. Repeated with additions and aggravations, it only gives food to the busy whisper of the malevolent, and, as the sagacious Richardson "is sure to be remembered long after the honest people have quite forgotten it themselves." Besides, on those occasions, rely on it, the world is much more inclined to be your husband's advocate than yours.

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In my opinion, there can hardly be a more despicable object than a married woman receiving the particular attentions of any man but her husband. A flirting girl is indeed bad enough; but a flirting married woman should be an object of contempt wherever she appears.

Perhaps your husband may be a plain man, or an old man; and though possessing both sense, merit, and feeling, neither cultivated nor captivating. Let this circumstance make you peculiarly circumspect in your conduct. The eye of the world is on you; and though your husband may scorn to betray, even by a look, any expression of jealousy, believe me it gives him no pleasure to see you dancing and chatting away with every young man who approaches you; for, at the moment perhaps when his good sense and manly pride make him smile, and join in the laugh and chat around, his heart may be exceedingly vexed and fretted at what he is ashamed to acknowledge even to himself. To say the truth, I never met with any husband, handsome, ugly, young, or old, who was pleased at seeing his wife's conversation and attraction much engrossed by other men.

Be you ever so conscious of a superiority of judgment or of talent, never let it appear to your husband. "A wife rules best by seeming to obey." And a man cannot endure the idea of inferiority in intellectual endowments. The very idea of being reflected on makes him infinitely more obstinate, and more wedded to his own opinion, when perhaps a

little management and good sense would bring him at once into your plans and wishes.

I cannot express the great dissatisfaction I feel at hearing married women laugh at and ridicule ladies who are advanced in life, and still remain single-females who probably in every respect are decidedly superior to the lady who treats them with contempt, and who perhaps remain single merely because they possess more delicacy of mind, and are not so easily pleased in the choice of a husband. Various are the causes which may occur to keep a woman single: duty, prudence, and not unfrequently, constancy to a beloved object; while a swarm of misses, strangers to sentiment, to delicacy, and to good sense, merely from their eagerness to become wives, clasp the chain of Hymen, and inconsiderately link themselves in the same moment to matrimony and misery, in the form of some petit maitre or antiquated beau.

Some wives, in order to display their own superiority to their husbands, are very fond of lessening and undervaluing the merit of other wives: be above such a paltry artifice; it is both ungenerous and unprincipled.

Should you, gentle lady, be in the decline

of life, allow me to bring to your recollection the emphatical address of St. Paul to aged women, where he charges them to "teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed."(Tit. ii. 4, 5.)

When the apostle speaks of keeping at home, he seems impressed with the calm, unobtrusive retirement of that domestic sphere which Providence and nature have usually assigned to women. Strongly, indeed, does he seem influenced by it when he says, "She that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth." (1 Tim. v. 6.) A woman may be compelled by duty, or business, to leave the domestic sphere; but to desert it wilfully for pleasure is indeed a moral death.

CHAPTER IV.

ON DOMESTIC ECONOMY.

if

I WOULD recommend every woman, possible, on her marriage, to get some yearly allowance, though ever so trifling, settled on her. Believe me, the little unavoidable demands on her husband's purse, to which a wife is so frequently compelled to have recourse, are very apt to create bickering and discord; and that at the very moment perhaps when all is peace and harmony between them and when once good humour is put out of its way, it is not such a very easy matter, rely on it, to bring it back again to its old course.

Conscientiously manage your husband's property, and shun every approach to extravagance. The domestic economy of a

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