Instead of Helen, Margaret and Elizabeth you affect Nellie, Maggie and Lizzie.
When your brothers were babies, you called them Bobbie, Dickie and Johnnie; but when they grow up to manhood, no more of that silly trash, if you please.
I know a woman, twenty-five years old, and as big as both my grandmothers put together, who insists upon being called Kittie, and her real name is Catherine; her brain is big enough to conduct affairs of State, she does nothing but giggle, cover up her face with her fan, and exclaim, "Don't now, you are real mean." How can a sensible man propose a life partnership to such a silly goose?
My dear girls, if you would get husbands, and sensible ones, dress in plain, neat, becoming garments, and talk like sensible, earnest sisters.
You say you don't care, you won't dress to please men, etc. Then, as I said in opening this sermon, I am not speaking to you. I am speaking to such girls as want husbands, and would like to know how to get them.
You say that the most sensible men are crazy after these butterflies of fashion. I beg your pardon, it is not so. Occasionally, even a brilliant man may marry a silly, weak woman. But to say, as I have heard women say a hundred times, that the most sensible men marry women without sense, is simply absurd. Nineteen times in twenty sensible men choose sensible women.
I grant you that in company men are very likely to gabble and toy with these over-dressed and forward creatures; but as to going to the altar with them, they beg to be excused.
Thirdly, among the men in the matrimonial market, only a very small number are rich; and in America very rarely make good husbands. But the number of those who are beginning in life, who are filled with a noble ambition, who have a future, is very large. These are worth having. But such will not, they dare not, ask you to join them, while they see you so idle, silly, and so gorgeously attired.
Let them see that you are industrious, economical, with habits that secure health and strength, that your life is earnest and real, that you are willing to begin at the beginning in life with the man you would consent to marry, then marriage will become the rule, and not as now, among certain classes, the exception.
Ah, if ever the time shall come, when young women have occupations, and can sustain a healthy, dignified attitude toward men,—if ever the time shall come when women are not such pitiful dependents, then marriage will become universal, and we shall all be happier, better, nobler.