In preceding writings I have shown in detail that there are more empty hours, even in a busy woman's life, than is supposed. When once her children are grown up, she has often too much liberty on her hands. I once knew a lady who had six children. Her two elder sons were at a boarding-school; her three daughters passed the whole day with their governess; even the youngest had his lesson hours. This lonely mother said to me mournfully on one occasion, "I pass the whole day alone with my sewing, and poor company it is;" and she was reduced, poor lady, to seeking outside distractions, innocent but futile. If she had had a taste for study and habits of industry, she would not have been driven from home. Study makes women love their homes, the attraction of work commenced always drawing them thither. How little need of visits and society such persons feel! It is a joy to steal off to one's room and continue one's reading or drawing. It is with a light step that one turns toward home when heart and life are filled with a love of study instead of with an immoderate, ruinous taste for dress and luxury.
Much firmness, sweetness, and perseverance are necessary to secure one's liberty in a household, to make one's working hours respected, without failing in any other duty; in one word, to give and reserve one's self discreetly. It is a question of degree, like most other questions of conduct. But, in order to acquire courage for the struggle, women must be very sure that the right is on their side. They are too apt to mistake for a mere personal taste the duty of cultivating their mental faculties.
I have given strong and unanswerable arguments for the necessity of a rule of life. But in this, as in every human affair, temperament must be consulted. Though it may easily be made an illusion and a convenient pretext to cover self-indulgence, yet one can easily believe that some women, with the best will in the world, must plead the impossibility of having a rule of life, or must submit to see it violated so often as to become a dead letter.
The mistress of a household rises in the morning, she feels unwell, or her husband comes in to discuss plans, business, no matter what; work-people, children little and big, invade her room: the mother of a family has not an hour when she can shut herself up and forbid intrusion. There are women and even girls whose lives slip away under the oppression of these absolutely tyrannical customs, from which it is the more difficult to escape because they assert themselves in the name of devotion and domestic virtue.
If we tell these young people, "crushed and flattened out," as M. de Maistre expresses it, "under the enormous weight of nothing," to create an individual life for themselves, and seek occasional retirement, they answer: "But I cannot; I have not one moment absolutely my own. If I leave the parlor, my room is invaded; somebody wants to speak to me, and so somebody stands about for a quarter of an hour and then sits down. Then some one else comes, and so the time is devoured. With all the efforts in the world to keep my patience, I cannot conceal the annoyance this is to me skilfully enough to avoid being voted a strong-minded woman," [Footnote 35] the correlative term of blue-stocking.
[Footnote 35: Caractère roide, femmes affairée.]
Very well, I say, for want of regular hours let a woman devote odd minutes to study. There are always some in the busiest lives; moments that occur between the various occupations of the day; and she must learn to work by fits and starts, in a desultory fashion. There is a wide difference between the woman who reads sometimes and the woman who never reads.
If the desire to reserve a short time for study led to nothing more than the acquisition of the science of odd minutes, the result would be very important. The science of odd minutes! It multiplies and fertilizes time, but books cannot impart it. It gives habits of order, attention, and precision that react from the external upon the moral life. The most cheerful women, the most equable, serviceable, and, I may add, the healthiest women, are those who are intelligent and industrious, and who, through the medium of a well-ordered activity, have discovered the secret of reconciling the duties they owe to God, to their families, and to themselves.