In my opinion, the "coming" woman's Alpha and Omega will not be matrimony. She will not of necessity sour into a pink-nosed old maid, or throw herself at any rickety old shell of humanity, whose clothes are as much out of repair as his morals. No, the future man will have to "step lively;" this wife is not to be had for the whistling. He will have a long canter round the pasture for her, and then she will leap the fence and leave him limping on the ground. Thick-soled boots and skating are coming in, and "nerves," novels and sentiment (by consequence) are going out. The coming woman, as I see her, is not to throw aside her needle; neither is she to sit embroidering worsted dogs and cats, or singing doubtful love ditties, and rolling up her eyes to "the chaste moon."
Heaven forbid she should stamp round with a cigar in her mouth, elbowing her neighbors, and puffing smoke in their faces; or stand on the free-love platform, _public or private_--_call it by what specious name you will_--wooing men who, low as they may have sunk in their own self-respect, would die before they would introduce her to the unsullied sister who shared their cradle.
Heaven forbid the coming woman should not have warm blood in her veins, quick to rush to her cheek, or tingle at her fingers' ends when her heart is astir. No, the coming woman shall be no cold, angular, flat-chested, narrow-shouldered, sharp-visaged Betsey, but she shall be a bright-eyed, full-chested, broad-shouldered, large-souled, intellectual being; able to walk, able to eat, able to fulfill her maternal destiny, and able--if it so please God--to go to her grave happy, self-poised and serene, though unwedded.
We often think of the solitariness and isolation of the young man--a stranger in a crowded city; suddenly cut adrift, perhaps from loving home influences--finding an inexorable necessity in his nature for sympathy and companionship--returning at night, when his day's toil is done, to his dreary, cell-like room, or, if he go out, solicited by myriad treacherous voices to unlearn the holy lessons taught at his mother's knee--solicited to show his "manliness" by drinking with every acquaintance that chance or the devil may send. That youth must needs be strongly intrenched in the _true_ idea of "manliness" not to waver and turn aside from his own independent course of well-doing. Alas! that to so many the fear of ridicule, or dread of "oddity," should have power to draw a veil over the swift and sure downfall of the drunkard or profligate. Alas! that the little word _No_ should be so impossible of articulation--in a circle, too, whose sneering condemnation of it were not worth a thought, no matter how brilliantly the jest or the song may issue from lips foul with the sophistry of "free-love;" than which _freedom_ nothing is more shackled with disgust and pain; for try as we will, God's image, though marred, shall never be wholly effaced: enough shall be left in every man's and woman's soul to protest against such desecration, though it voice itself, as it often does, in bitter denunciation of what the soul knows to be its only true happiness. The holy stars make no record of the gasping sigh, brief but intense, that their purity has evoked. The little bird trills out its matins, and vespers, all unconscious that their sweetness forces the unwelcome tear from some world-sated eye. Bless God, these moments will and do come to the most reckless--these swift heralds of our immortality--to be silenced never in this world; if disregarded, to be mourned over forever in the next; for the fiercest theologian's idea of "hell" can never, it seems to me, go beyond the consciousness of god-like powers wasted and debased--noble opportunities of benefiting our race defiling past the memory in mournful procession, and the sorrowing soul nerveless, powerless to bid them stay.