cannot rival, and can hardly estimate. No general plans his campaigns or
marshals his armies better than some women of society--the late Mrs. Paran
Stevens, for instance--manage the circles of which they are the centre. Day
and night, winter and summer, at city or watering-place, year in and year
out, such a woman keeps open house for her gay world. She has a perpetual
series of guests who must be fed luxuriously, and amused profusely; she
talks to them in three or four languages; at her entertainments she notes
who is present and who absent, as carefully as Napoleon watched his
soldiers; her interchange of cards, alone, is a thing as complex as the
army muster-rolls: thus she plans, organizes, conquers, and governs. People
speak of her existence as that of a doll or a toy, when she is the most
untiring of campaigners. Grant that her aim is, after all, unworthy, and
that you pity the worn face which has to force so many smiles. No matter:
the smiles are there, and so is the success. I often wish that the
reformers would do their work as thoroughly as the women of society do
theirs.

No, there is no constitutional want of thoroughness in women. The trouble
is that into the new work upon which they are just entering they have not
yet brought their thoroughness to bear. They suffer and are defrauded and
are reproached, simply because they have not yet nerved themselves to do
well the things which they have asserted their right to do. A distinguished
woman, who earns one of the largest incomes ever honestly earned by any one
of her sex, off the stage, told me the other day that she left all her
business affairs to the management of others, and did not even know how to
draw a check on a bank. What a melancholy self-exhibition was that of a
clever American woman, whom I knew, the author of half a dozen successful
books, refusing to look her own accounts in the face until they had got
into such a tangle that not even her own referees could disentangle them to
suit her! These things show, not that women are constitutionally wanting in