LADIES' GOSSIP.

Otago Witness, Issue 2762, 20 February 1907, Page 65

LADIES' GOSSIP.

— Were our great and greatest grandmothers so much more worthy than we are" i simply because they scarce! y had any liberty of will at all, or was it merely i lack of opportunity that created the meek and mild and wholly dependent bread-and-butter misses, who now are happily becoming obsolete? — Mrs Neish, in M. A. P. — Let mothers send their girls out into the world fully equipped in all necessary knowledge, not only how to cultivate the sunlight, but how to battle with the shadows, how to discriminate between the false and the true, between, to put it plainly, the sound and the unsound. — John Strange Winter, in Ideas. — The American girl of to-day, between the ages of 15 and 22, is an intolerable bore, self-conscious, ignorant, and concerned chiefly with matrimonial aspirations. To the Englishman her pertness, which he ! imagines to be chic, is fascinating and Indicative of mental brightness, but this effect is attributable largely to his own j dulness. It is the clever management of a limited number of phrases, supplemented by copious use of what he considers delightful slang. In point of intelligence she is, we believe, the equal if not the superior Df her English cousin, but in the choice of language she is sadly inferior. — North American Review. ~ — Cambodia, Indo-China, is the country which produces the greatest quantity of rubies. Under enormous difficulties, and at the coKt of many human lives, do the Burmese miners 6natch these precious gems from the lap of the earth. Having discovered a valuable ruby, the miners use every imaginable subterfuge for deceiving j the inspectors and thus appropriating the ( stone. Rubies are very fashionable as | engagement rings. Tfie reason for this • is the innumerable virtues which the Orientals attribute to them. According to these mystical people, the stone heals all wounds, brings concord and happiness into the domestic circle, endows its wearer with eloquence, preserves the eyes from divease, and ciues dropsy, with other qualities too numero- J to mention. — There are surgi? } tides of wickedness all around us to d-%/. * The woman is given a sceptic which, If used rightly, will i prove a power ie stemming these tides. I The key of social life is, largely, in j woman's hand. Woman to-day :an well I nigh make society what she will. As woman is advanced society is elevated. These pointed sentenses were uttered by the Rev. W. R. Young, D.D., pastor of ' St. James's Methodist Church at Montreal, in the course of a sermon on "Woman — her 'I will not.'" His seimon was founded on the account, in ' the Book of Esther, of Queen Vashti's ' refusal to exhibit her personal charms ' to a drunken king Ahasuerus or Xerxes and his drunken courtiers. Woman, at the beginning, Dr Young said, had been created man's equal, and whenever man had given her the chance she had pioved herself worthy of the position. Her physical strength might not be quite equal to that of man, but her powers of ' endurance were greater. Mentally, in , every literary, philosophical, scientific field she had proved herself a worthy | competitor. Her love, in its intensity, its _ constancy, and its self-sacrifice was the sweetest flowei that blossomed in the j desert foil of a fallen world, and was a | power worthy of the place among the forces that control the world. The drunken courtiers of the drunken king were afraid of woman's rule — the rule of such a woman as Vashti over such men as they — 60, to prevent it, they made a law that men >nly should rule in their households. They were like some husbands of to-day whe were in the habit of coming home in the small hours of the morning from the club or the political caucus or somewhere, chiefly "some- j where." These men, too, are afraid of the rule of good women, and want to keep full power in their own hands. Vafihti, with all the grandeur of a true, noble, and pure womanhood, refused to obey the command of such men, and was willing to take the consequences. The days of Xerxes, the preacher said, were past, but the days were still here in , which: were needed women like Vashti, j strong enough to give to the evil com- | mands of evil men the full force of a noble woman's "I will not." To-day the name of Vashti was held in sacred remembrance, while the name of Xerxes

was remembered only as a selfish tyrant-. "Take the so-called questionable amuse* ments of to-day. How long would your ballrooms last,"" asked Mr Young, "if women said, 'I will not allow freedoms in the ballroom that I would scorn t<j> permit in* my home ?' "