The Joys of Being a Woman, and Other Papers

Produced by Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google...

Our mental operations are keyed to the very sublimation of delicacy and rapidity, and they need to be, considering the subtleties of the skill with which we must employ them. Ev...

The best way to get rid of the pauper spirit is to pauperize some one else. This is cynical philanthropy, but veracious psychology. It follows that the best way to restore a pau...

The detriment due to boarding does not confine itself to animate beings, but extends to the inanimate. In a boarding-house even the chairs look protesting and sat upon. The curt...

When I look back upon a half-century of wasted life, I find that there are no years that accuse me of neglected opportunity more poignantly than those between five and twelve. I...

“Choose,” commanded my mother, “will you have a new dress this winter or ‘St. Nicholas’ for next year?” I was stung at the implication that for such as me there could have been...

The letter-writer is always an observant person. He has the pictorial eye and the pictorial pen. The view framed by his window sash must never grow stale for him, across it the...

The fallibility of a woman’s body seems beyond disputing. If a man does dispute it, it is because he never had one; if a woman disputes it, well, personally, if I can’t be as st...

Her white house is the same, with a difference. It was always a house fitted to the person like a garment, a friendly house with peace in the corners, a house warm with sun or f...

She chose her farm to fit her, it had run sadly seedy, but she retouched all its fading picturesqueness. The house is pillared, frame, low, and white. Small grilled windows wink...

So the little girl’s visits to her grandmother came to an end, like a beautiful book read through. But though it is never the same as the first time, one may read a book over ag...

Of gardens “so much has been said and on the whole so well said,” that I might perhaps restrain my pen from turning up that overworked soil. But yet the gardens of which I write...

There is in the mere aspect of Littleville a latent friendliness perceptible to all eyes that give more than a touring-car glance. Over our hilly streets slumbers eternal leisur...

When we go into a new parish the first person we meet is some one who isn’t there, namely, our predecessor, that thorn in the flesh of the most righteous saint and soldier. Ther...

We of to-day may as well acknowledge first as last that our feet, set in infancy to the pace of eternity, will never step lively enough for the present age. While deprecating th...