And this work must be her own, must lie within the sphere of her own relations to others, and she must engage in it from a sense of duty that takes its promptings from her own consciousness of right.

No other woman can judge of her relation to this work, and she who dares to interfere or turn her aside should be considered an enemy--not a friend.
No wonder, if this be true, that we have so many women of taste, cultivation, and often brilliant intellectual powers, blazing about like comets or shooting stars in our social firmament.

They attract admiring attention, excite our wonder, give us themes for conversation and criticism; but as guides and indicators while we sail over the dangerous sea of life, what are they in comparison with some humble star of the sixth magnitude that ever keeps its true place in the heavens, shining on with its small but steady ray, a perpetual blessing?
And so the patient, thoughtful, loving wife and mother, doing her daily work for human souls and bodies, though her intellectual powers be humble, and her taste but poorly cultivated, fills more honorably her sphere than any of her more brilliant sisters, who cast off what they consider the shackles by which custom and tyranny have bound them down to mere home duties and the drudgery of household care.

If down into these they would bring their superior powers, their cultivated tastes, their larger knowledge, how quickly would some desert homes in our land put on refreshing greenness, and desolate gardens blossom like the rose! We should have, instead of vast imaginary Utopias in the future, model homes in the present, the light and beauty of which, shining abroad, would give higher types of social life for common emulation.
Ah, if the Genius of Social Reform would only take her stand centrally! If she would make the regeneration of homes the great achievement of our day, then would she indeed come with promise and blessing.

But, alas! she is so far vagrant in her habits--a fortune-telling gipsy, not a true, loving, useful woman.
Unhappily for Mrs.Emerson, it was the weird-eyed, fortune-telling gipsy whose Delphic utterances had bewildered her mind.
The reconciliation which followed the Christmas-time troubles of Irene and her husband had given both more prudent self-control.