It is an altar-fire that we will kindle every evening, just to light up our room, and show it to advantage.

And that is what I call woman's genius.

To make life beautiful; to keep down and out of sight the hard, dry, prosaic side--and keep up the poetry--that is my idea of our 'mission.' I think woman ought to be what Hawthorne calls 'The Artist of the Beautiful.'" Mrs.Stowe is in the right.

In this commonplace, fearfully real world, what would we do without the blessed Gospel of Conventionalities?
In almost every family there is one member, frequently the father of the household, who, like my young friend, has no patience with "make-believes" and eyes all innovations with stern disapproval and distrust.

It is pitiful to witness the harmless deceits practiced by mothers and daughters, the wiles many and varied, by which they strive to introduce some much-to-be-desired point of table etiquette to which "Papa is opposed." Sometimes his protest takes the form of a good-natured laugh and shrug accompanied by the time-battered observation that "you can't teach an old dog new tricks." More frequently overtures of this kind are repulsed by the gruff excuse: "My father and mother never had any of these new-fangled notions and they got on all right.