Grappling, forthwith, with the most obstinate of these last--I name it boldly.

John is not--he never can be--and would not be if he could--a woman.

Taking into consideration the incontrovertible truth that nobody but a woman ever understood another woman--the situation is serious enough.

So desperate in fact, that every mother's daughter of the missionary sex is fired with zealous desire to mend it, and chooses for a subject her own special John--_in esse_ or _in posse_.
This may sound like badinage, but it is uttered in sad earnest.

The wife's irrational longing to extract absolute sympathy of taste, opinion and feeling, from her wedded lord, is a baneful growth which is as sure to spring up about the domestic hearth as pursley--named by the Indian, "the white man's foot"-- to show itself about the squatter's door.