Page:The Higher Education of Women.djvu/39

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IDEALS.
35

mistress, duly impressed with the obligation of training her pupils to be accomplished pleasers of men, and trying to fashion for them a model out of such materials! Must not the result be simply blank despair? The same conclusion might be reached by a shorter process. Men are supposed to marry the sort of women they like. But looking upon the infinite variety of wives to be met with in society, could any one generalise from them a model wife, who might serve as a pattern to educators? Would any man wish for a wife so modelled? Might it not be as well to abandon this distracting theory—to discard the shifting standard of opinion, and to fall back upon the old doctrine which teaches educators to seek in every human soul for