GET THEE
BEHIND ME, S
A HOME-BORN BOOK OF HOME-TRUTHS.
BY
/) X - OLIVE,{ LOGAN
(MRS. WIRT SIKES),
AUTHOR O)F " CHATEAU FRISSAC," " PHOTOGRAPHS OF PARIS LIFE,"
" WOMEN AND THEATRES," "THE MIMIC WORI.D," ETC.
NEW YORK:
ADAMS, VICTOR & CO.,
98 WILLIAM STREET.
I 872.
y1 
I
r/~
SATAN! 
-e
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year x872, by
ADAMS, VICTOR-& CO.,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
POOLE & MACLAUCHLAN, PRINTERS,
205-213 East Toelfih Street,
NEW YORE. 
To MY BEST FRIEND,
MY COMPANION AND GUIDE,
MY HUSBAND.
0
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Pi7.*4.
42M 
I 
INTRODUCTION.
IT seems to me that there is a useful career, just
at this moment, for a woman-book which shall
breathe the spirit of true love, and the sweet sanctities which grow out of Christian marriage: A book
which shall stand for the progressive and liberal
women of our day, who love home and hate the
abominable doctrines which have distracted and
broken our ranks: A book which shall speak for the
good and the true, and indicate the right paths of
usefulness, duty, and achievement, and which shall
strike home upon the loose principles that certainly
are gaining ground respecting marriage and home
life.
With regard to home and love-sweetness and
light; our sunny parlor; our cheerful hearth; the
circle of loved ones there.
With regard to progressive ideas-purity, truth,
and woman's honor before everything.
With regard to all forms of error, whether merely
false and feeble, or strongly gross and licentious Get thee behind me, Satan "
279046 
I 
GET THEE BEHIND ME, SATAN!
I.
DOES  the  poem  about "The  Old Oaken
Bucket" strike you as sickly'sentimentality?
"Utterly puerile, such a poem," I once heard
a critic say; " what deeper expressions of love,
what fonder outpourings of the heart could the
poet have lavished on a human being, than he
does on this sloppy, old, verdigrisy, dilapidated
wooden pail?"
I never loved a bucket; yet I acknowledge
that I am uncommonly fond of a Table.
. This particular one Husband bought at second
hand for five dollars-years ago, when he was a
struggling young author, and was fitting up a
sanctum down-town. It is a large oval table,
covered with black leather-so large indeed that
it was never carried in at any door, but adopts
a sort of locomotion of its own and rolls in  
8        Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
and it filled Husband's little sanctum so full that
there was hardly room for anything else. After
divers vicissitudes (there's a romantic history
coeval with the ups and downs of that table, but
I am not the one to tell it-no, Husband must tell
you that), the old table has found its way into our
dining-room, and we have eaten our meals off
it ever since we bought our new house.
What I like most particularly about the table
is that it is as solid as a rock. That is to say, it
doesn't shake when everybody leans on it.
We have written books on it, sewed on it, ironed on it; cut patterns on it, answered letters on it,
played games on it; held a fancy fair on it; married a couple in front of it. Somehow, everything that has to be done in the house gets done
on that table. If any one sends us flowers, be
sure they go on the table; if a new book is presented or bought, "lay it on the table."  It
changes its character with the hours; it is now a
table of ceremony, now a dining-table, now a
work-bench; the bird-cage is cleaned on the
table; the porcelain tea-set is washed on the
table;  bo  ha. be.   th t.
If it had been possible to take the table out
walking with us, there is no question but its 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
four legs would have had many a stretching at
Central Park of a sunny afternoon. We would
have it always with us if we could. It is one of
our dearest friends.
And observe, that, though there are at least
a dozen other tables in the house, this alone is
The Table. In the front parlor is a buhl table
worth as many dollars as Husband paid cents for
The Table. The buhl table came from Paris,
and was once in the palace of Versailles. You
know how beautiful the buhl work is?-solid
brass inlaid with tortoise-shell. This has four
busts in brass of Marie Antoinette placed at
each leg- perfect likenesses of this unhappy
Queen, about as large as my  hand.   It is a
gorgeous piece of furniture, which  rivets the
attention of a stranger the moment he enters the
room. In the back parlor is a little gem of a
table made of ebony and polished so highly you
can see yourself reflected in it as you look at the
delicate flowers inlaid in the top. This also
came from one of the French palaces, and has
thin aristocratic legs, and folding leaves that are
so bewilderingly pretty that when they are up
you think they look better so, and when they
are down you decidedly prefer them so.  Per     I*
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Io'   -Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
haps you will wonder that these beautiful
articles should be in the possession of such
mere democratic persons as ourselves. But you
will remember that the war between France and
Germany threw many choice objects in the way
of cultured purchasers, and we have friends in
Paris. Besides these foreign tables, there is a
long list of other tables, one for every room, of
course-  ending with  Norah's table, which
Husband chopped out of the pine box in which
the buhl table came across ocean, and which
he nailed together so skilfully that Norah was
in ecstasies over it, and when he tacked it all
over with green cambric and brass-headed tacks,
Norah drew in her breath and rolled up her
eyes and vowed that she liked it "better than
the brass Bull in the parlor!"
Husband does marvels with his tool-box, by
the way. Having been reared with a pen in
his fingers, he naturally finds a tool-box as
fascinating as a puzzle.' He goes at things with
his hammer and nails on the slightest provocation, and if there is anything he can find to do
with the screw-driver he is happy. He has
mended the old sanctum rocking-chair so many
times that it is a sight to behold. He finds a 
Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
sort of comfort in having things get out of
order about the house, so he can go and tinker
at them.
Around The Table we gather in the evening.
Husband and I, dear sisters, children, friends;
puss and servants in the background; two
good gas-burners over our heads; our books,
our games, our needlework, our newspapers;oh, Cosiness, thou dwellest in the Table.
Sometimes it is a round game-parcheesi, Dr.
Busby,  Muggins,  Loto.   Sometimes  it is a
rebus to be guessed, and all work at it. Sometimes Husband contributes an original poem, or
furnishes a humorous conundrum; and frequently our Algie becomes our instructor, and tells
us strange facts about fish or birds on which a
learned Professor has this day lectured the boys
at school. It often happens, too, that we hear
him recite his lessons; and then we look at the
youngster with admiring awe, as he rattles off
names of rivers in China and mountains in Japan
of whose existence we were profoundly ignorant.
Reader, have you a Table? No?
Then haste to get one; for, by my faith, a
Table and your soul's salvation are nearer allied
than you may think.
I I 
2  Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Why, reflect-putting yourself aside-upon
these sweet boys and giris, now sitting around,
swinging their legs and kicking sportively the
legs of the Table,-which bears it meekly and
does not so much as even shake in return,-how
dear to them in future years may be the memory of these guileless hours passed around the
Table! What a sword and shield against the
hot and burning temptations of Tableless afteryears!
Our boy Algie-or your boy, say-grows to
manhood, launches into business-boot and shoe
man makes him tempting offers-" wholesale
trade, San Francisco, big thing "-he enters
the wholesale trade, he goes to San Francisco,
he puts to the test the bigness of the thing; it
is smaller than he expected; the boy is lonely,
is tempted, his beautiful face gains him wicked
flatterers, his good counsellors are far away, the
gilded palaces of San Francisco glitter in the
eyes of nineteen, he enters "just to see;" a
glass goes to his lips, he is about to take a drink,
his FIRST, when suddenly the phantom of The
Table rises before him, he dashes the cup to
earth and flies!
Excuse me, if in my excitement over this
I, 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
picture, I adopt the language of the temperance
lecturer.
The truth is, Algie-typifying our boy or
your boy-puts the glass down gently so as not
to attract attention, whistles softly in an off-hand
manner and then goes quietly out.
But he is saved, all the same; and the Table
did it. 
Or our girl-or yours; in a few years she
will be a woman.   We cannot always stay by
her; she will have to meet and battle with the
world as we have done, She is already greatly
impressed with the idea of a larger sphere of
usefulness for woman. Will it ever be her fate
to fall into the hands of those emissaries of Satan
who call themselves Free-lovers? Will the specious doctrine ever be poured in her young ears
by oily Mephistophelian women, until, carried
away by it and the passions of youth, she is on
the point of falling? Why, let but her memory
not die within her brain,'and I will risk her,
Satanesses, even in your toils! The recollection
of The Table, the knowledge of the horror your
doctrines inspire in the breasts of those who sat
around it, will carry her pure through an ordeal
even as fiery as yours.
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14     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Thus it may happen that a second-hand fivedollar table, animated by love, vivified by sympathy, humanized by daily contact, may have
the power to save a living soul.
II.
AROUND our Table we strive to be all children
together. Why is it that grown people generally consider their own physical and moral altitude so much above that of children, that when
they try to unbend they do it about as gracefully
as an elephant who folds his flabby legs beneath
him and dumps himself down to receive his
castle?
I have seen a sin-ridden man behave with
such haughty contempt to a little girl-merely
because she was a child-that for a moment his
presumption might almost have caused you to
lose sight of the palpable truth-that the little
girl, being a late telegram from the kingdom of
Heaven, was a thousand times more valuable
than the man, a worthless express package,
labelled C. 0. D. for Satan.
I have seen a father come home from work, 
Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
and finding his daughter sitting in his favorite
chair, cry out in a rough voice-"' Here.! here!
get out of that! What are you doing in my
chair?"  As if he thought a piece of furniture
so honored as to be sat bn by so mighty a
potentate as himself should never, even in his
absence, be defiled by furnishing support to
any small person.
Is not "My dear, let Papa have his chair," as
easy of utterance as "Beoff with you?"
What linguistic difficulties stand in the way
of "Daughter, will you be good enough to
bring me  my  slippers?"  And where is the
child whose eye will not brighten, whose cheeks
will not flush with pleasure at the knowledge
that she is her father's own little friend,' her
Papa's girl?"
I once dwelt in a family where there was a
Father who had six daughters. Think what a
clan! But he loved them every one. Each, to
him, even in earliest childhood, had a distinct
character; one was classic and majestic; one,
a great reader; one, thoughtful and inquiring
("wish you had a dictionary slung around your
neck," said her brother Bill, "so you wouldn't
be forever asking me what words mean"); a
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i6      Get Thee behind Mle, Satan!
fourth was the family beauty; a fifth was musi cal; the sixth, the cunning little baby-born in
a disastrous cholera season; therefore when she
squalled the girls pronounced her " choleric."
And this father, poet, scholar, great traveller;
of whom we fully believed the neighborhood
stood in awe for his learning; whom the great
magazines of both continents courted for their
pages; was a courteous gentleman to his
youngest baby.
This tells heavily, in the time to come. You
may not care for this baby-critic while she is
still a baby-but the day may come when she
will be a baby no longer, and her opinion of
you will have been formed in that very infantile
period for which you had such contempt.
A child's mind is.limited in its objects. It
has not pored over books; it is ignorant of
Latin; but it knows if a blade of grass springs
up between the bricks in the yard, and can tell
where the tacks are pla'ced which hold down the
carpet. A fly's eye sees a narrow territory,
but it knows that territory with a minuteness
that would astonish you in spite of your great
goggles, many times bigger than its whole body.
Thus does your child-girl or boy-see little 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
traits in you, good and bad, which you and
other grown persons overlook, being occupied
with your larger fields of observation and criticism.
This home of ours is built up on love. Every
room is full of it. It sings in the songs of our
bird, it perfumes us through the odor of our
flowers; the very cat mews it; the tea-kettle
hums it; every inanimate thing cries it with a
voice as ringing as an angel's trump
At risk of seeing a smile curl the lip of yon
cynic reader, I will tell you  that  many  and
many a time we gather around our old Table,
set for a meal, and reach out and grasp each
other's hands as we sit, in pure gush of simple
affection for each other, and thankfulness to
God for giving us our home. Not one cloud
mars the harmony of that group. We have all
known sorrow keenly; it is that, perhaps, which
enables us so fully to appreciate the worth of
that which we enjoy. Anl it is our unanimous
verdict that nothing in this world, so far as we
know (and our travels have been over weary
miles, and in many countries), nothing can
equal the satisfaction of true heart's love, and
true heart's home.
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x8      Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
Not all the romances that were ever written,
not all the love-songs that were ever sung,
could give the mere curious inquirer one gleam
of knowledge of the perfect joy which marriage
brings to the wedded couple who sit daily at
our Table.  Oh, the radiant beauty of that
rare, rich love!  How  it shines and glows!
How it warms every heart that comes near it,
and beholds its pure, white flame! I would if I
could put the love-life of these people on a pedestal, and turn upon it the blaze of a moral
calcium light, that all the world might look
upon it and behold its beauty, and see how its
glorious effulgence flings into deepest shadow
the black and iniquitous structures called Freelove, Mormonism, and the like.
This husband and this wife are true heart.
twins. Their every sentiment is in common.
Every desire of the one is a heart-craving to be
met and humored by the other.   They have
scarcely need of words, to communicate what
they feel; to look in each other's eyes is to
read the secret of each other's souls. The language they speak with their eyes is deeper,
richer, stronger than any words which ever yet
evre framed by mortal lips. 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
We know that this marriage was made in
heaven.  Every member of our little household
can see that the golden links were riveted by
angels.   Yet it was born of mutual sorrow.
Iron is united by the fiercest flame. With torn
and bleeding hearts, half their span of years
gone, this man and this woman joined hands
and said, "Until Death us do part."
Knowing that the sad day must come when
Death shall part them, they hold every day that
dawns upon them a blessed privilege of companionship.   More precious than any molten
gold is their association. Marred by no strife,
dimmed by. no jealousies, purer than anything
else on earth is such a love as this. And they
know, too, that their separation will be but for
a time. What God hath joined together, He
will not put asunder.
We  have no'gloomy beliefs, at our house.
We do not think of Heaven as a dreadful, far-off
abstraction, but as a cheerful and cheering reality.  We  believe our home-circle will be a
most happy one, Up There.
Sister Rebecca has had to part with her hearttwin —Dick, her Dick, her brave, hearty, strong
noble-mninded Dick, stricken down by Southern
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20      Get Thiee behind Me, Satan!
fever-heats in the prime of his manhood. Dick
waits for her in heaven. She knows she shall
meet  him.   She  lingers a little, by  God's
will, here.   She  speaks  of  him  so  often
and in such bright and happy tones that a
stranger would think he were alive, and might
come in and take his seat at our Table any minute. Dick's picture, daintily framed, stands on
the buffet on Rebecca's left hand; the hand of
her wedding- ring, the side of her heart. "This
is Dick's," she says of his belongings, as if he
had them in daily use. "My pillow bears the
imprint of Dick's head," she said one day as
she was putting on a clean pillow-slip, "he
always oiled his hair." This without any of
that gaunt horror, or sentimental gloom, that
most people have regarding the articles the dead
have used. She patted the pillow tenderly, and
looked at it with a fond smile as if she saw
there the beloved face once more.
III.
I MARVEL sometimes at the presumption
which made the inventors of the licentious
thing fix upon the name  "free love" for their
I 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
abomination. It is precisely like the performance of the quack doctor who compounds some
disgusting and poisonous draught and blazes
it on fences and dead walls as "Elixir of Life."
The only freedom love knows is the freedom
of marriage. It is common in these degenerate
days to speak contemptuously of the bonds of
marriage. By the way, that is a law term, is it
not?-the "bonds of matrimony."
Rather let us have a higher-law term for this
blessed thing. The emancipation of matrimony!
That is a truer phrase. So much happiness, so
much freedom, with so much innocence! The
hearts which yesterday could not mingle without
sin, to-day mingle freely and with God's blessing.
If I- could fancy a "free-lover" loving with
such love as that which I have just now pictured
to you, I should marvel at the stupidity which
would not have that love endowed with the freedom of Christian marriage. To feel that towards
this man your heart yearnrs every hour; that towards him your whole being is drawn by strong
cords which only death can break; to long to
rest in his stalwart arms and pour into his ear
the gush of tender, endearing epithets which
wells up in your breast-and with all this to feel
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22      Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
that the world stands between you and him and
says, This is sin!
Is not that being in the bonds of slavery?
To repress your natural instincts; to hold back
every longing; to refrain from every caress, or
to stand condemned by the stern laws of a society
which, after all, is based on pule morality.
To the lover with soul imbued with such love
as this, Marriage comes as a blessed relief from
thraldom.  That which yesterday was sin, to-day
is virtue! You have stood up before the world,
and with your friends about you as witnesseswith sisters, brothers, father, mother, all there
to smile upon your act-with the minister of
God to bless it-you have promised to love and
cherish each other so long as ye both shall liveand all good men and women smile upon you.
Is not this freedom? In truth there is no other,
for those who love.
Yes, I pity the woman who can feel satisfied
to sacrifice all this. She can never know what
real happiness is.
For the rest, I stand amazed at the bold assumptions of ignorance herein. They talk of
love, those "free-lovers," as glibly as if they
knew what love is! They have not a glimmer 
Get TheAe behind Me, Satan!
ing idea 6f it. The vainest young girl whose
fancy is tickled with a notion that some callow
youth adores her, and who knows therein as
much of the true glow and glory of love as a
baby staring at pictures in "Mother Goose"
knows of literature or high art-this girl is yet
as far advanced in the knowledge of true love as
any "free-lover" who flaunts her vile creed in
honest people's faces to-day.
Yes, unto me has come that knowledge which,
when it comes to any soul, is seen at once to be
the simple truth-that there is no true love
which is born in a moment full-fledged. True
love never did and never can exist in a union of
short duration. The sentiment is the growth
of years, and of long acquaintanceship.
When we were girls, each passing passion or
fancy was believed to be love. We knew! Ah,
isn't it astonishing how much we knew when we
were very young? I remember quite easily the
time when I should have read with Charley
somebody-I forget his exact name now-such
words as here are written, and laughed at them
as the utterances of an old fogy.
When your day comes to be an old fogy,
dear young girl, my kindest wish for you is that
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24      Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
you may be able to lay your hand in the hand
of a good man, and feel that you too have acquired this knowledge: that life is good for
nothing without true love-not the wild, pestering thing which worried and tantalized your
young heart years ago, but this restful, substantial, trustful love which makes you happy in the
mere knowledge that he is with you; which
makes you grateful, cheerful and at peace with
all the world, day in and day out.
This married couple at our house illustrate
my subject as completely as if they had been
framed by my own fancy-yet, they are no
more fictitious characters than you are yourself-you who sit reading this page. They
have not lived a humdrum life. If you were to
read their story from its beginning, you would
say that no novelist ever devised a' tale more
thrilling, more  romantic.   In  it is included
almost every element which goes to the making
of a modern novel. The scenes in which they
have figured have been the most beautiful and
picturesque in the world-amid the roar and
rush of mighty London town; in the whirl of
gay, seductive Paris; away up on the tops of
snowclad Alps; among the grandeur and the 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
glory of the Sierras; in the Rocky Mountains;
in castles on the Rhine; over the fierce, arid
plains of the great American desert; through
the lagoons of the torrid South-where else?
I might go on for pages in merely picturing the
spots of earth which this man and woman have
pressed with their feet, in their various roamings through their strange life-story.
After the stirring dramas of their two lives,
they are now  one.   Look  at them in their
home! They are more enwrapt in each other
than any Isabella and Alphonso you ever read
of. No woman is so beautiful to that man as
this woman-yet her first youth has gone,
taking with it the rosiness and roundness of her
ch.eek, and the crudities'and inequalities of her
character. To him, she is perfect-as he is to
her. They read the same books, lead the same
life of labor and of pleasure.   Hours upon
hours these people will sit conversing together,
and never was there known between them one
moment  of ennui, one second when interest
flagged, or when they desired other company.
Other numberless hours have passed when not
one syllable has been uttered; hands were
busy, minds were plying on workaday affairs;
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26     Get T,zee behind Me, Satan!
but through all, and under all, this great love
lies, not like a roaring cataract, but like a broad
stream on whose smooth, strong breast every
earthly care is bravely and tranquilly borne.
On him the woman rests; "What a brave,
noble husband you have to lean on!" a friend
who knew him well once wrote to her; but not
less does he rest on her. I saw them last even-ing at twilight none were by; their attitude
was the attitude of the most romantic lovers.
But, when they are in presence of other people
they are as prosaic as two of the same sex. In
fact, they have had five years of a strictly Platonic friendship-beginning without a thought
of love, a dream of the possibility of marriagetheir tenderest sentiment one of honest admiration for each other's qualities. They did not
klnow it, but they were building their future life
and love on a foundation of granite. Time
rolled on, and the day came when it seemed
right for them now to part.  Part?  It seemed
so easy to do, until they tried to do it,'and then
they found it were easier to part the waters of
ocean, and bid each'half to roll its separate
way. So they clasped hands and said, God has
joined us together; we will obey tHis law.
* 
Get T1zee behind Me, Satan!
Our dear Robert Collyer says that as God
made Eve for Adam, so makes He a certain woman for every certain,man; and when the pitfalls and dangers of our own wicked blindness
and folly, or other people's wickedness and
folly, fail to keep these people apart, then this
is marriage-and nothing else is marriage, nor
can it be made so.
In such a marriage as this is there any danger of pining for "free love?."  When one has
found a diamond, one does not wish to exchange
it for a pebble, no, nor for a handful of pebbles.
IV.
How beautiful our Table looks to-day! Spotless napery, glittering. glasses, a few appetizing
niceties daintily served.  In the center stands a
large vase, whose broken top is deftly hidden by
the sprays of some long, green plant.
"By the way, Rebecca, what is that green
plant?-Oh,  no,  it cannot be!  not carrottops!"
"Yes," says Rebecca, pouring out the chocolate in our thin, shell-like china cups.   " Mr.
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28      Get Thee behind Me, Satan! /
Tyler, our greengrocer, was just about to cut
them off and throw them under his stall; but I
said,' Never mind, Mr. Tyler, you needn't cut
off those carrot-tops; I generally make bouquets
of them.' He laughed at that, but you see how
pretty they look. I was sorry to find Jane had
broken the vase. I didn't know it before. You
did, you say. It is a great drawback that Jane's
daily avocations generally include the breaking
of something that we would prefer to have remain whole." 
Jane is our second girl.   She is the finesthued and the slowest creature, we think, that
ever lived. Her complexion is as white as wax,
and her hair is so light that at the temples you
can scarcely tell where the skin finishes, and the
hair begins.   Her eyes are blue; pretty little
figure; not yet eighteen. We have often tried
to get at the mystery of this strangely fair comnplexion.   Perhaps some  of us muggy  folks
would like to have orfe like it. She said once
that the reason of it was that she cut her feet
with a stone when she was ten years old, and
the blood all ran out of her body.
"But you must have some blood left," said
Algie, "or you'd die." 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
"No, I ain't got no blood left in me body,"
persisted Jane; "that's the reason I'm so slow.
That's the reason I break things."
Of course after this bloodless explanation
we should be cold-blooded indeed if we were
to think of scolding her when she breaks things.
We can only wait patiently till she gets some
more blood, or submit quietly, and as a matter
of blood, to her daily breakages.
Jane is not very strong-minded. A mouse
is a terrible animal to her. One or two large
roaches nearly prostrated her with fright. Rebecca cheered her spirits, and brought her a
trap.
"Now,"  she said,  "Jane, just put that in
your room, and when you hear the roaches holloa you'll know you've caught some."
"Will  they holler, mum?"  queries Jane,
aghast at the prospect.
There is no good, sensible, housekeeping reason why we have not discharged Jane long ago.
She is certainly not a prize, viewed merely as a
servant.   Why then do we keep her?   In a
word, because we are attached to her. We did
let her go once, and she cried as if her heart
would break.   Then she took to making us
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30     Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
visits occasionally, just to see how we were getting on. And one day, in a weak moment of
real, kindly affection for the child (she is scarcely
more), we took her back.
Yes, our love is so all-embracing that it needs
must cover with its warmth every creature within our doors-say nothing of those without them.
It covers the very cat. Not because she is at
all a superior character of a cat. She is, in fact,
a somewhat humdrum creature, our Kittle. She
has no bright ways; she is not very handsome;
she has even a disreputable habit of sleeping at
odd times in the coal-bin, and as a result her
white coat is sometimes sadly soiled. Still we
love Kittle, and it would go hard with the dog
that should dare to worry her.
When she curls herself upon the rug before
the grate and falls to purring contentedly, she
looks so happy that we are tempted to endow
her with all the feline virtues. She becomes a
type of the sweet, domrestic peace which is the
guardian spiritof our home. 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
V.
So profound is my reverence for true Marriage, that my soul chafes almost unto fury at the
idea of baseness in any way associated with it.
If I abhor Mrs. Freelove when she rails at
marriage, I abhor Mrs. Mercenary no less
when she pollutes marriage by making bargains
in its holy name.
Between the woman who lives with two husbands and is married to neither, and the woman
who marries the man she well knows she does
not love, there is nof so much choice as between a rotten apple and a sound horse-chestnut.
By all the love I bear for marriage, I protest
against the pernicious errors so earnestly fostered in its name-chief among which is that error
which holds a girl put into the world for the
purpose of marrying a man, and for nothing
else.
,When you will believe, and act up to the belief, that a boy's purpose in life is that limited
one, I will concede that the girl has but that
one excuse for being.
3I 
32      Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
But you know very well that you have ambitions for your boy. You do not teach him to
consider marriage as an only end in life.  To
be sure, you hope he will some day marry and
settle down, become a good husband and father,
and an estimable citizen; but you leave all
that to come about in its own good'time. If
this were your course with your girl, it would
be better for her-and better for the boys,
too.
While there is abroad in the land an army of
girls, each seeking whom she may marry, your
boy is in danger of being entrapped into a foolish
marriage, which will make work for the divorce
court later on.
Verily I say unto you-and I am no manhater, but so far at least as one man is concern
ed a devoted man-lover —that men are to blame
for the married flirt, for the half-starved sewinggirl, for the insolent, inefficient servant-woman.
Every one of these separate branches and
others like them-even that terrible one where
lost souls, dragging polluted bodies, haunt the
night streets, and offend the chastity of the
moon which coldly shines on them-every one
of these is a branch of the deadly Upas which 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan3!
men yearly plant, daily water, hourly tend.
The root is that widespread and pernicious idea,
carefully fostered by men in a thousand ways,
by hints, by winks, by plain words, by actions
which speak louder than words, that the business in life for women is marriage; the only
girl who is successful is the girl who is engaged;
the only woman whose "fortune is made" is the
woman who has hooked a husband.
You, father, scanning these lines, deny perhaps that you have ever said to your daughter
that her business in life is to get married.  But
have you ever done anything to encourage her
to have any other business in life? Have you
even begged her to refrain till the last moment
from taking from your hearthstone the exceeding great joy which her presence brings there?
Has it never happened that you have recommended this man to her consideration, and added that he was rich and looking for a wife?
Have you never shut the dbor on that one because he hadn't a dollar? Or that one because
he was nose a marrying man? Have you never
alluded to the expense of keeping a large family
of girls? Have you never audibly wondered
how Smith's ugly daughter caught rich Johnson?
2*
33 
34      Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Has it never struck you as amazing strange that
our girls got no offers when everybody else's girls
get married?
If you could place yourself in the position of
a girl so situated, eating some one else's bread,
wearing some one else's clothes, occupying a
room in some one else's house, you would know
how to feel for her. A thousand things cut her
to the soul. That frown you wore at breakfast
this morning-was that because young Batkins
hasn't proposed yet? Perhaps you spoke of the
high price of flour-nay, I do not mean that
you intended anything personal by such a purely
business-man remark, but it hit the tender, sensitive, self-reproaching girl at your table, who
knows you want to marry her off.
"' It is nine dollars a barrel,' said he, at the
supper-table," wrote a lovely girl to me during
the war, "and I laid down the bit of bread I
was eating. Another morsel would have choked
me."
I have known girls whose guardians exhibited
such unseemly anxiety to get them married off
that every manifestation of growing admiration
on the part of their gentleman friends was kept
by the girls a profound secret, lest the impatient 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
elders should rush in at the next visit, take all
for granted, and ask When the wedding?
But you may say, Is it not likely that the support of these helpless girls is a serious burden to
these parents or these guardians?
Sans doute. Nobody disputes that. Indeed,
no family I know seems rich enough to bear this
burden, and I know some families of tolerable
wealth, too; millionaires, at least. But I would
still like to find a family which is rich enough
not to care whether its daughters marry, or
whether they do not.
One of the richest men in New York said in
my hearing once, speaking of his daughter who
had passed the age at which girls generally
marry, "I get ai,-ry at her sometimes, because
she don't get a husband. She needn't bring
me a poor man. I'm not going to help a poor
son-in-law. No, she's a rich man's daughter,
always been used to luxuries, and she must
marry a rich man."
But, that is what poor men's daughters want
to marry; and if this girl was placed exactly in
the same position as a poor girl, what advantage
was it to her to be the daughter of a rich man?
This same man freely gave his son one hun
35 
36      Get Thee behind MIe, Satan!
dred thousand dollars to set him up in business
in Australia; and in talking a bookful at him
one day I told him that he had much better
have divided that money between his children
and given them equal chances for success. Fifty
thousand dollars must be no small sum even in
Australia where they dig gold out of the earth;
and fifty thousand in New York would have enabled the girl to make the investment in a
husband she desired (yes, there was the old
romance-the poor lover, the rich daughter, the
obdurate father, true to his r6le of stern parent)
and trust to this man, her heart's choice, to get
an income out of it. It seems to me, with as
much money as that invested in United States
bonds, a person of the poorest abilities could
sit down and make a decent living out of them
by cutting off the coupons.
But to return to people who really find it
difficult to meet their weekly expenses, and by
whom the support of an additional person is
keenly felt.  I say, very well; then you must
take one of two positions: either say frankly
that you are not able to support this girl, and
take the consequence of that; or say warmly
and truthfully that you are, and take the con 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
sequence of that. If the first, then help your
girl lovingly and cheerfully to help herself; let
her choose her career; she knows better than
you do what she can do. If her talents are of
no more brilliant character than will take heras our Norah's have-into the kitchen of your
next-door neighbor, place no obstacle in the way
of her doing that. If they lead her to making
speeches in public, blow not one breath against
her for doing that.
A now-celebrated literary woman told me
that her brother persistently denied her relationship with him for years, because his pride was
wounded; he had not strength of mind enough
to support the position concerning woman's
work and wages which she boldly took in her
writings. But he got bravely over it as years
passed and her success grew-even to the extent of sharing her imcome with her in a fraternal
spirit.
It is such paltry family pride as this, which
does much of the mischief. There is no girl so
shallow that she cannot learn to do something
that would earn her bread. Nine girls out of
ten do do, in the household where they live-for
which they get no praise, no thanks, much less
37 
38      Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
any pay-such work as, were it performed in
any other household, would bring them bread
and wages too, and both would be considered
fairly earned.
I have spoken of our Rebecca-our good sister, who does us the happiness of sharing our
home. She lives with us; we all livetogether.
That is the poetic side. The practical side is
that she is our housekeeper, and works hard.
She is a good housekeeper, and would command her price in the market.  She has never
been in the market, but that is no reason why
we should ignore her value. We do not. A
pretty figure we should make pretending that
we think so much of her, and then giving her
less than persons utterly indifferent to her would
give for her services! Any stranger's family
who needed her services would give her board,
lodging and salary. Shallve not do as much
for her as a stranger's family would? We do.
We give her board, lodging and salary-and
love. Thus we have the advantage of the
stranger's family, and not the stranger's family
of us.
But if-which God forefend-our lovely home
should be broken up to-morrow-its hearth
4 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
stone shattered, its ashes flung to the winds-I
would gladly take that dear sister by the hand
and go with her from house to house of my
wealthy friends, and ask them if they didn't
want to engage my sister as housekeeper on a
salary. No pride of mine' should stand in the
way of her earnfing an honorable livelihood. A
dastardly coward I should be indeed were I, in
my effort to hide my fallen fortunes, to constrain her to remain by my side lest the world
should comment on her going forth to laborthe while I led her a life of torture, grudged her
the bread she ate, even insulted her widowhood
perhaps by urging her to marry for her bed and
board! I thank my God I am no such coward.
Now and forever be accursed that pride which
drives many a.noble-hearted, hand-cuffed girl
into an abhorred and bestial marriage! Pride
of family and of purse, how I wish your father
Satan would rise and claim you both for his
own, and sweep you off the earth where you
work such woful mischief!
39 
40      Get Thee behind.Ve, Satan!
VI.
How many or how few years ago it matters
not, but it was before I had written or publicly
spoken about woman's rights, or wrongs, I accompanied a beautiful girl on a strange errand.
Goaded by the innuendos relating to the extraordinary fact that nobody proposed to her,
while Mollie Follie had just caught a rich man
-a leather-dealer in the swamp, whose sole
subjects of conversation were tanning and hides
-cut to the quick by references to the high
price of flour, the ruinous rate of living, rent,
clothing, shoe-leather, &c.-this girl found an
excuse for leaving the breakfast-table, and the
house.
"An early visitor, Estelle," I said to her,
kissing her peachy cheek as she entered my
room.
"Yes, early in one vay, but sadly late in
another.   Please read that advertisement, cut
from this morning's paper."
Wanted, a nurse-girl, to take care of three young children.
One able to give some primary instruction preferred.    Apply
between 8 and 9 in the morning, at, etc., etc. 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan.
"What of it?" I asked.
"I am going to apply for the situation."
"You?"
A girl who lived in a brown-stone front, with
-presumably-nothing to do from morning to
night, apply for a nurse-girl's situation!
I say presumably, but the presumption was
far from correct; the truth was that she made
beds, swept floors, dusted the parlors, polished
the glass and silver, and on washing and ironing
days went into the kitchen and washed dishes.
But all this went for nothing. If the fact was
noted now and then, she was made to understand plainly that if it were not for her sake,
they would scarcely be at the expense of living
in such a house at all; if she timidly grieved
that they should do this, and assured them that
for her part she would be happier in a cheaper
house, they made tacit answer that such houses
were the best places in which to catch rich
husbands; that really skilful girls did catch such
husbands with such houses; that Mollie Follie
had just done so. She (Estelle) had been taken
to Saratoga, Newport, Long Branch (the very
last places to catch a husband!); she had passed
a winter in a gay city hotel; and finally she
0
4I 
42      Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
was in this house. How much longer were
they to wait for the returns of this heavy investment?
If you ask me if thus much was said by Estelle's aunt and uncle, in so many words, I answer-Probably not. But, it was there; that
was the atmosphere she breathed.  The air had
been especially charged with the offensive gas
that morning.
"What can I do for you, dear?" I asked, laying down my pen.
"Come with me, please. I confess I feel
somewhat timid.  But I will go-whether you
come or not."
A  long ride in a stage, and a long walk
westward across the avenues, brought us to the
advertised house. It was not such a fine one as
that in which Estelle lived.  I confess my heart
beat a little faster as we mounted the steps; as
for Estelle, her lips were livid, but they were
tightly set. 
We asked to see "the lady," and were ushered into the parlor. Why not? We visited in
better houses than this.
The lady soon appeared, smiling and extending her hands, mistaking us for friends as she 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
advanced from the sombre depths of the back
parlor. As she drew near she saw her mistake,
and, seating herself, gave a polite glance of
awaiting our pleasure to tell her the object of
our call.
At this moment my eye rested on Estelle, and
though many and many a time I had admired
her from the depths of my heart, and thought
her the loveliest girl I ever saw, yet never in my
life had I seen her looking at once so beautiful
and so elegant as now. No detail of her appearance escaped me; and at this moment,
though years of sorrow and suffering have
elapsed, chasing away many beautiful visions of
the past, I can yet see her peach-like face set in
the frame of a soft gray velvet bonnet, a delicate
moss-rose lying on the parting of her luxuriant
hair, her long eyelashes shading her downcast
eyes.   She was dressed from head to foot in
soft gray poplin, with perfectly fitting gloves of
the same shade; the gold band bracelets she
always wore clasped her wrists; and her muff
and fur collar had been recently bought for seventy-five dollars.
I might give you an idea of how this toilet
was got togethor without great expense. Such
43 
44      Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
a girl is generally a mistress of expedients.
The effect of Estelle's costume was that of great
expensiveness. But the dress was an old one
of her aunt's made over; the furs were a longpromised present from a distant rich relation;
the bonnet was her own handiwork, thrown together out of a handful of discarded materials
the gloves were new. Her aunt had bought
them with a groan and thrust them upon the
unwilling recipient a few days before. It was
not her dress, however, but her attitude, which
was so striking; as she sat there in all her glorious beauty, utterly reposeful, utterly determined, almost sanctified in her stillness and her
resolve.
"I have come to apply for the place of nursegirl," she said sweetly, lifting her pure eyes
steadily to the lady's face.
Please imagine the expression of this latter!
If a bombshell had burst in her parlor she
could not have been, apparently, more astonished. She looked at me, she looked at Estelle,
she looked at herself. By all odds, Estelle was
not only the handsomest and the youngest, but
also the wealthiest looking person of the trio.
The lady was rather untidy in a dressing-gown 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan! 
and slippers; I was in my working dress-a
substantial English linsey, suited to the labor
which deals with ink-bottles and dusty libraries.
There is no use giving the conversation in
detail. The coolest person present was Estelle.
The lady could only reply in broken snatches of
sentences.
"But the wages, such a trifle!-seven dollars
a month."
"They include board and lodging. I will
take them if you are satisfied with me," said
Estelle.
"But have you ever taken care of young
children?-washed them, dressed them, walked
them out in the street? One of my children is
a baby and must be carried, or pushed in a
perambulator."
"I could soon learn how to do these things,"
said Estelle, with exceeding sweetness and
modesty.   "And I like children."
Here I put in a word about her great amiability, her gentleness, her refinement; but all
this was written on her face. The lady hesitated. It was evident she feared there was some
deep mystery here; some plot, some plan,
some Wilkie Collins imbroglio of which she was
45 
46     Get Thgee behind Me, Satan!
to be the victim. That so simple a thing could
be, as that the girl had sought the situation to
do honest work and get an honest livelihood in
return for it, apparently did not strike her as
probable. Yet her womanly heart was touched.
She was strongly tempted to say yes.
At that moment the front door opened with
a latch-key, and an instant after, a man's form
stood on the threshold of this parlor. It was
easy to see he was this lady's son.  He was
fashionably attired, and had an all-night air
which spoke of chamnpagne suppers and other
dissipations.
At first the lady smiled on seeing him; then
she looked  at Estelle, and  then  her  brow
clouded.
The young man after glancing admiringly at
Estelle (who would not have done so?) turned
and went up stairs.
As for Estelle she had not heard his step,
and had not lifted her eyes.
The.lady spoke up sharply. Her whole manner had changed.
"Well I'm sorry, but it is impossible for me
to take you. You are too young. You will not
suit." 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Nothing remained but for us to take our
leaves.  We took them.
If that lady should read this book she will not
learn from it who Estelle was, but it may surprise her to learn the name of the person who
went to her house with a friend to help beg a
nurse-girl's situation.
I have formed many theories about her sudden change of manner.  The wildest, and therefore the one which lingers longest in my memory,
is that she connected-in some way known best
to herself-the beautiful applicant for the nursegirl's position with her dissipated son, and resolved at once that she would have no wool
pulled over lIer eyes!
I never broached this suspicion to Estelle; it
would have caused her unnecessary pain.
When we had turned the corner, and were out
of possible view of the lady or her son, we
stopped, and took our bearings. Then I observed that Estelle's lip was quivering.
"Is it not dreadful that I cannot get a place
even as child's nurse! Oh, what an unlucky
girl I am! What was I born for? Nobody
cares for me-nobody wants me!"
Spite of her efforts, some hot tears fell. I
47 
48      Get Thlee behind Me, Satan!
think several of the passers-by saw them. But,
dear me! a wretched, broken-spirited girl is no
novelty in the streets of New York.
"Being amateurs in this business," I said,
"I am inclined to think we made one mistake.
You are too well-dressed-you look too much
like a lady. One would think that ought to be
a recommendation to a mother who has little
girls growing up; but it is marvellous how people's minds run in the old ruts.  She wants an
Irish or German nurse-girl of the orthodox
pattern; and when she has got her, she will pass
half her time in abusing her, and the other half
in wondering whether the nurse isn't abusing the
children. But, no matter. Rome wasn't built
in a day.  We live and learn.  Let us now go
where a lady-like appearance and good clothing
are a recommendation-to the retail stores."
With an interval of but ten minutes to eat a
sandwich in a baker's shop we passed the whole
of that day in unsuccessful efforts to get a place
in a "store."  Everything was full.  It was dusk
when we stopped, almost completely baffled;
and we were as tired as hounds after the chase.
"There is only one thing more," I said; " I
have a friend who has an influential position in 
Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
Nip and Tuck's Sewing-Machine Establishment.
She may be able to do something for you."
We were not far from the place, and found
them just bustling about before closing for the
night. A few words from me made my friend
understand my errand.
Well, she said, they were full now (the'sold
story); but a vacancy might presently occur; in
fact they might make one.  She would speak
to Mr. Tuck, the junior partner.
He came. He was favorably impressed. He
said they always wanted their young ladies to
be nice-looking ("Did he presume to mean a
compliment?"  said Estelle, afterwards); but,
one thing every new-comer must understand,
and that was:-that she had got to recognize,
that she had got to believe that theirs was the
finest machine in the market. She had got to
believe that; otherwise she could not impress
customers with that belief. It was the best
machine, he declared stoutly  no machine that
ever was put together could do the work or stand
the wear that their machine could, and as for the
stitch, it was by all odds the finest stitch ever
seen.  Any girl who came there with a prejudice in favor of any other machine was not
8
49 
50     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
wanted. He might as well say that first as
last.
Estelle had always used that which is the best
known of the machines, and to which Nip and
Tuck's little affair compares as a tea-kettle to a
locomotive.
"For the first month," continued Mr. Tuck,
"we give no wages. Our young ladies are
learning to operate" (meantime an inducement
to customers was, that  they  could learn to
operate in an hour!); "and when they know
how to operate we give wages according to the
ability of the operator."
"How much do you give to a good operator?" I asked.
"Well, we give some of our young ladies
seven dollars a week."
"Seven dollars!"
"Yes, but those are our best-dressed young
ladies. We expect those young ladies to dress
very well. And then we seat them by the windows.  We should be glad to have this young
lady sit there."
The shop was on a corner, and was one sheet
of plate glass, so to speak, from floor to ceiling,
on both streets.  Everything and everybody in 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
side was as plainly visible to the outside throng
of Broadway as if the machines and the girls
were out on the sidewalk.
Estelle shuddered, as she glanced at the huge
show window where she should be expected to
sit on exhibition; but, without referring to that,
she said, in her candid way, 
"But this stitch ravels the whole length if
you pull the thread; how do you explain that
to customers?"
Mr. Tuck seemed  to get greatly excited
whenever the stitch the machine made was in
question. He grew quite red in the face, and
said loudly:
"It's an advantage! Tell'em it's an advantage. Who wants a machine where you have
to cut every stitch in ripping? Besides, it only
ravels one way. You can't ravel it the other."
He pulled on one end of a couple of bits of
cloth which were stitched together; this resisted, and he looked triumphant; but as he
finished his experiment, a loop at the other end
caught on his watch-chain, and ripped the seam
the whole length before you could have said
Jack Robinson.
Estelle drew me aside.  "It would be utterly
5I 
52   - Get Thee behind Me, Satan!.t
false on my part to say I believed that stitch
superior to that made by the machine we use at
home. It is only good for millinery work, or
for light fabrics which are not to be washed.
How can I tell a falsehood?"
Will you think me a wicked counsellor? My
feet were sore from standing and walking in my
hitherto fruitless efforts to aid this girl to escape
from the degrading position she occupied at
home; I was hungry, I was tired, and I knew
that her sufferings and discomforts were greater
than mine. I begged her to be diplomatic; to
try to manage matters so that she need injure
neither her conscience nor her interest, and take
the place.
After stipulating that she might sit with her
back to the window, and that she was to receive seven dollars a week after four weeks'
apprenticeship, Estelle concluded to come.
She had resolved in her heart that if the hour
came when she must tell a falsehood, she would
resign her place; meantime, it had not come,
and it might not; and she was making a beginning in self-support.
I left Estelle listening to some final remarks
from Mr. Tuck, and sauntered slowly to the 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
door talking to the lady through whose kind
interest this arrangement had been made.
In another instant Estelle brushed past with
her face aflame. She grasped my hand.
"Come, please," said she, "I shall not take
this situation-cannot-must not."
Before I knew it the glass doors were'Closed
behind us. My last glance through them revealed to my eyes in the dusk, which the busy
lamp-lighter was fast dispelling, Mr. Tuck shrugging his shoulders, half angrily, half contemptuously.
Of course, I thought that he had insulted her.
But I did the worthy Mr. Tuck great injustice
in thinking so. In declining the place, Estelle
had no doubt greatly insulted him.
She did not wait for me to ask her what had
happened. She spoke:
"Where in the world do you suppose he
wanted to send me to-morrow-with a machine?"
"Not to some den of iniquity?"
"To Mrs. Wickersham's."
"Who is she?"
"Don't you know Mrs. Wickersham? One
of the richest ladies who visits at our houseAunt Sophia's most stylish friend. She would
53 
54  Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
die of anger and shame if she were to find out
that I had gone to Mrs. Wickersham's."
"Did you not contemplate these probabilities
when you resolved to cut loose the bonds which
chafe you so?"
"I did not contemplate the probability of my
going as a machine girl with    another machine
girl to Mrs. Wickersham's house, where I have
been a guest."
"And will you please tell me," said I, almost
out of patience, "whether Mrs. Wickersham, a
heartless, soulless woman, ignorant and narrowminded, given over to dress and show, who pretends to admire you-I remember her nowmore than any girl she ever knew, and yet who
wouldn't give you a dollar to buy your dinner
to-night-"
"I don't believe she's got a dollar to give,"
said Estelle interrupting, and thereby breaking
the smooth flow of my torrent of indigna
tion.
The vision of this wretched Mrs. Wickersham,
without a dollar to call her own; the poor, weak
appendage to a rich man, who hung a pair or
three-thousand-dollar diamond ear-rings in her
ears, not out of compliment to her ears (which 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan /
received few enough compliments from him,
according to her own story), but as an advertisement of the enviable condition of his whiskeyfilled pocket-book, fairly sickened me with sorrow and disgust. And yet, if Estelle could
have made such a marriage as this Mrs. Wickersham had made, her Aunt and Uncle would have
thought she had attained the grandest glory this
mundane sphere has to offer woman, and would
have rejoiced thereat exceedingly.
Estelle returned to her old life. Worn out,
tired, discouraged by her long day's unsuccessful tramp, she felt the noble resolves of the
morning fade away in the darkness of the falling
night.
You say this was a very weak girl. I say she
was stronger than the average, or she never
would have made even this spasmodic effort to
free herself from a position which she loathed.
It required no small amount of courage to go to
a strange house and ask for a nurse-girl's place.
It was trying beyond words to tramp for a whole
day from store to store, and shop to shop, and
meet rebuffs at all.
It seems strange, but I believe it to be strictly
true, that the persons who had in their hands
5-5 
56      Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
the direction of the life-journey of this immortal
soul, truly loved her. Nay, I know this to be
true; yet I concede that they come under the
head of those people who love, yet have "a
mighty queer way of showing it. " Their efforts
to get her married were unselfish.  All they
wanted was hey good, they said. They had no
object but to have her make a marriage worthy
her; but their idea of worthiness in a man related principally to the state of his pocket.  But
if she had married a millionaire they would not
have expected nor touched a dollar of his income-thus far, they were noble. Meantime
neither the millionaire, nor the semi-millionaire,
nor the demi-semi-millionaire, nor even the nonmillionaire turned up; they found the supporting
of her weary work and let her see it; but when
she suggested doing something for her support
-oh no, their pride forbade that! So the deadlock continued. She returned to the glorious
career of waiting to be narried.
"And I don't see why she shouldn't get married off-hand, if she was so beautiful, amiable,
and estimable as you represent her."
Thus I fancy some easy-going, good-natured
masculine reader saying.
I t. 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
-Well, that is precisely what her Uncle and
Aunt used to say.
VII.
A MOST joyous period to a girl is when she
says good-by to the trammels of girlhood, and
"enters life" as a woman; when she first wakes
to full consciousness of her beauty; when she
begins to realize the power of that beauty over
the opposite sex; when she sees clearly that
beauty is a crown and sceptre to its possessor,
and makes her, while it lasts, a queen.
I say "while it lasts;" but this consideration
rarely presents itself to a girl's mind.   She
hears sermons preached about the fleeting character of beauty, but she does not apply them to
herself. She goes home from church, looks in
the glass, sees that her cheek is as round and
her eye as bright as they were six months ago,
and she thinks this prognostication does not
apply to her.  It is, perhaps, true in a general
way, but she is going to be an exception.
You tell her that homely Mrs. Smith yonder
was once as pretty.as herself. She shrugs her
3*
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58      Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
shoulders. You think so if you say so, but you
are mistaken. You have old-fogy ideas on the
subject.   You  are arguing from the ten-ortwenty-years-ago point of view, when lots of
frumpy, horrid things were in fashion.   And
Mrs. Smith's beauty must have been of a piece
with coal-scuttle bonnets and waists up under
the arm-pits.
There appeared on the book-stalls a few
years ago a little volume called "The Autobiography of a Beauty." The story in its pages
was scarcely more than a catalogue of the number of men whose brain had been turned or
whose hearts taken captive by the loveliness
of the face and form of the autobiographer.
Duels had been fought, "knock-downs" come
to pass in hotel corridors and other public
places, between men maddened with the beauty
of that face, and fighting for its smiles.
And that the reader might have some idea
of what this face was, a.ne steel engraving of
it was placed opposite the title-page.
Oh, how entrancingly beautiful was that face!
It was the style of beauty which we used to see
in the old English volumes called "keepsakes,"
which, full of engravings of beautiful women, 
Get Thlee behind Me, Satan!
were laid on drawing-room tables in place of
the photograph albums which we now find
there.
But  this face was  so  very lovely!  You
scarcely wondered it had driven men mad.
Soft, loosely-twisted brown curls fell gracefully on each oval cheek; the fine brow shaded
with the rippling locks which strayed carelessly
across it; the nose a perfect aquiline; mouth a
rosebud's self; chin small, round, firm; neck
like a swan's; shoulders sloping away gradually into the perfectly moulded arms; waist
tapering in beautiful symmetry with the rest
of this fairy-like vision.
I should not have been so minute in this description of this picture if I had not something
further to tell. The original was well known
in New York and Boston society.   Yes, the
autobiographer, the Beauty, walked among us,
a thing of life. And when her book appeared
with that title, and that picture in it, such a
shout of derision went up among the belles of
the period as is seldom heard from lips usually
well guarded against all vulgar, unrestrained
expressions of emotion.
For the lady as we knew her was enormously
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' 5o     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
stout, her enormously large waist wider than
her enormously wide shoulders; her face red,
mottled, blotchy; her hair dragged off her exposed forehead in that most trying of all fashions, a la Chinoise; her throat large, full, short;
her chin, a double one;  her walk, a duck's
waddle. And yet-will you believe me? —to
the eye which looked, the original of the picture
was plainly to be seen in the present face.
Every one knows that no complexion is so
easily reddened and blotched as thie most delicate and fair one; no hair breaks and tangles so
easily as that which is soft and silky. The eyes
were the same, the nose was the same-it was
the Beauty-with her beauty gone.
There was nothing humorous to me in the
sight of this woman, formerly so lovely. She
was a living Sermnon, more prophetic than minister ever preached. To look at the picture and
then at her, was like looking at one you love
lying in the coflin. To this complexion you
must come at last.
There is a ghastly picture in the Wiertz Gallery, at Brussels, which I sometimes wish-in
my indignation at the frivolity of those girls
who absolutely worship their own beauty, ay,
I 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
bow down and worship it, offer up incense to it,
make a very god of it —I sometimes wish, I say,
that I had power to invoke this picture to appear before me when I listed, that I might hold
it up to the view of these girls and strike terror
to their hearts with it.  It is the picture of a
beautiful girl in the high bloom of health, her
cheeks glowing, her eyes sparkling, her ruddy
lips parted, coming across in a museum the
skeleton of a girl labelled " The Beautiful
~ouise!"  She stops before it, and is contemplating it with deep and solemn thought. Perhaps it is a girl she knew; one of her schoolmates, it may be; her sister, even. Look how
the hollow sockets return her gaze! See the
grin on those bony jaws, in ghastly mockery of
her look of sad interest! They are both of a
height, these two; the breast bones of the
skeleton indicate the same form of bust as that
which is so admired in the living girl; every
bone, every joint, every articulation is thereOh, they are sisters, if only in the sense that-we
are all members of one family! The  resemblance between the two is perfect. One is a
living skeleton, prettily clothed in flesh; the
other is a dead one, with its clothing gone.
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62     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
And this was the beautiful Louise! Where is
her beauty now?
I yield to no one in my admiration of beauty,
but I place it in the right scale-far below
mind, not to be mentioned beside heart attri butes, soul qualities.
One of the most striking characters in Dickens is Mr. Carker, the man who has beautiful
teeth. Now we all know that beautiful teeth
are much to be admired for their mere beauty's
sake; many an otherwise handsome face has
been spoiled by blackened, decayed and offensive teeth; many a homely face with a large
square mouth has been redeemed from positive
ugliness by a splendid set of really handsome
teeth. And handsome teeth have a worth beyond beauty; unlike the fairness of one's cheek,
or the shade of one's hair, sound and handsome
teeth are necessary to health.
Mr. Carker has so exaggerated in his own
mind the beauty of white teeth, has fixed so entirely erroneous a value on the beauty of good
teeth, that he goes through the world in which
he moves with the idea ever present in his mind
to show you his teeth, his beautiful teeth, his
very-superior-to-yours teeth, his worth-more
I 
Gct' Thec bchiiid Me,  Salaii!
than-anything-in-the-world teeth. It is a curious
comment on the value of his possession that he
proves to have nothing but teeth; his heart and
character are worthless.
Girls, you who read this page, drink deep
these truisms: that 3Beauty is but skin deep
that handsome is that handsome does. 
These inelegant phrases strike you as forcibly
as nursery rhymes svould, perhaps; yet  like
many of the latter they have the kernels of sound
philosophy beneath their grotesque husks.
Greenough the sculptor told me that his services were once engaged to make the bust of an
American girl. He had not seen her before she
came to him for sittings; but her mother said to
him, "You'll find my daughter is a very pretty
girl, Mr. Greenough, except that she has a bad
skin."   The artist naturally thought that the
young girl's skin was disfigured; pitted, perhaps,
or blemished with some eruption. He was surprised to find that her skin was as smooth and
as soft as velvet, but that it was yellowish in
tinge.
And remember, Miss Strawberry Cream, that
you cannot long keep that youthful glow; the
apple blossoms are more delicate and fresher
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64      Gct Thce bc/izt  Me, Satan!
than your cheekl, yet they change into round,
ruddy apples-not half so charming in a mere
Esthetic sense as the blossoms were, bat more
appreciable in solid value.
A bit of undigested food; late hours; I know
not what triviality, may any day turn that fresh
rose in your cheek into a faded one.  This is
mnaking no allowance for serious illness, which is
liable to attack you as well as the next girl, and
may come any minute and change your whole
appearance. Happy indeed are you if, when a
malignant fever strikes you, it robs you only of
your fine complexion, leaving your hearing and
your eyesight as perfect as before.
So much for the beauty which is skin deep.
Has it never happened to you to have acquaintance with a person whose physical beauty
was undoubted, yet who gradually developed
qualities which aroused your disdain and disgust
to that degree that you shuddered at the sight
of that person, and loathed their very beauty?
For a magnificent exposition of the growth of
this feeling, read " Romola," by that gifted
woman "George Eliot."   See how the nobleminded girl Romola is fascinated by the gorgeous beauty of the youth Tito; observe how 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
she invests him with all the lovely attributes of
mind and heart which should go hand in hand
with such a winning face; follow her closely as
she discovers that not one of these attributes is
in reality there; that he is vain, selfish in the
most supreme degree, heartless, fickle, faithless,
lying, hypocritical, and a traitor; till at length
her heart closes against this one who formerly
lived there, enthroned a king with a crown of
her own conjuring, not with one he really possessed; and she shuts him out forever. His
very beauty had grown into ugliness for her.
Thoreau rendered "Handsome is that handsome does" poetically; he said,
"We are all sculptors and painters, and our
material is our own flesh and blood and bones.
Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's
features, and meanness or sensuality to imbrute
them."
VIII.
CLARA VERE DE VERE goes to a ball to-night.
Her toilet is lovely; delicate violet and white,
just the faint tinge of mourning which Clara has
put on for that uncle of hers in California who
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66     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
died three months ago and left her money.
Clara is one of the few very rich girls of America; with large estates and revenues all in her
own right, left her by different members of the
rich old Jersey family to which she belongs.
Perhaps you think there is no disadvantage in
being a rich girl.  Clara could tell you her troubles! One of the chief among them is that she
never knows whether people really like her, or
whether they pay court to her on account of her
money. Another is that if she wears an elegant
dress and the diamonds which are heirlooms in
the family, she hears comments about her always
wanting to outshine other girls "because she's
got money." If she wears a simple dress, folks
say she's mean.
"Did you ever!-a white tarletan! such  a
rich girl! Oh, they say she's awfully stingy; I
pity the man that gets her!"
Every artist she meets expects her to buy his
pictures or statues forthwith, because she has
money. If she doesn't, again she is dubbed
"mean."  That  she may not want them, is
nothing to the point; she might give them to
some of her friends. Tickets for concerts,
church fairs, lectures, piano-forte recitals pour
I 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
in by the score for her purchasing. If in any
case she declines, the fact is noised about from
one aristocratic house to another.  Her defenders say she's eccentric; her defamers that she's
stingy. People lean forward to see what she
puts in the contribution-box; tradesmen double
their prices when she sets out to buy of them.
Fashion gossipers report her in print as engaged to this man or that. There is no privacy for
her anywhere: She goes to a watering-place,
and every eye is on her. People of questionable standing follow her as she walks, and stop
when she stops, to give lookers-on the impression that they belong to her party.  Other people make her trumpery presents, expecting
something gorgeous in return; and if she does
not send it, they, set to work to defame her
again.
Clara is a coquette.   How she is to discover
whether a man truly loves her or not, she says
she does not know.   Meantime, she amuses herself with that most dangerous of all diversions,
flirting. Look at her at the piano, surrounded
by admirers! see how she asks-with winning
smnile —this young officer to turn over the leaves
of her music-book for her; and as soon as the
67 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
leaf is turned, casts her eyes towards another
gentleman and sings, gazing at him pointedly
(or so it seems to him), " toi quej'aime!" Ah,
Clara, Clara Vere de Vere, better let the foolish
yeoman go! You're spoiled, incurably; you
are that most terrible thing, a rich coquette!
But, coquetry thrives in every circle of young
people, and in every condition of purse. I
have seen negresses out in the fields planting
cotton, arrayed in pannier overskirts and jockey
hat and feather, tossing their heads coquettishly
as some dusky admirer neared the fence.
Here is our little friend Susie-a dreadfully
coquettish girl of sixteen.   She goes to school,
daintily clad, tripping along on tiny boots
which she declares don't hurt her-and I
suppose she knows. She has a small regiment
of admirers.   "My paper collars," she calls
them. They are the boys of the neighborhood
and range in their ages from fifteen to twenty.
"They always go,,and do something when
they  are  twenty,"  says  Susie;  "generally
marry."
We ask her how she likes that.
"Oh, I don't care; there are always new
comers to fill up the gaps."
68 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Pretty precocious, eh? Yes, she is a girl of
the period.  She'll get no better till she gets
worse-that worse being the final coquetry
which leads to a foolish marriage.
Susie's principal field of battle is the sidewalk. She asks permission demurely as a kitten
of her mother to walk up and down the sidewalk at dusk with. a girl-friend. She receives
it, and they start off so innocently-oh, cat's
whiskers and'cream, butter wouldn't melt in
their mouths! All at once they are joined,
first by this boy, then by that, and the first the
astonished mother knows, looking out of the
parlor window, is that the two girls are the extreme centre of an advancing wing of a solid
masculine army which stretches from curb to
area gate.
It is difficult to put a stop to an amusement,
a diversion, an intercourse which seems so
harmless as this; yet such pranks are dangerous.
Why, can you believe that, our Algie-not
yet fifteen-has got a lot of notes from a girl
of his own age or near about, tied up with
blue ribbon, and put away carefully in his trunk
tray? I disapprove of this, but what can you
say when he invites you to read them, and
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70      Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
you find they are composed of such harmless
nothings as:
DEAR A.
I got ten for writing to-day; did you have your grammar
lesson? Yours truly,
LULA.
Or this:
Miss Lula Lawson's comps. to Mr. Algernon, and requests
the pleasure of his company at a party on her steps this evening.
N. B. You are requested to bring something.
P. S.  Mottoes-or anything nice-would be acceptable.
"This is a jolly country for an unmarried
man to live in," said to me not long ago a
young Englishman who had been in America
some months, "because the girls are so jolly
fond of flirting."
"Do you find them any more so than English girls? " said I, prepared to wave an imaginary stars-and-stripes,over his head, and dare
him to the fray.
"Oh yes, you know; positively-you mustn't
feel annoyed-young ladies most delightful
young ladies-not the slightest harm meant,
you know; quite as irreproachable as our En,g
I 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan /
lish girls, but they do things, you know, that
would ruin the character of any young girl in
England."
As what, for instance?"
Why, meet a fellow."
"What do you mean by'meet a fellow?'
You surely do not mean that you are acquainted with young girls in this city, or this country,
who claim to be reputable, and yet deliberately
meet young men!"
"Yes, I do.  They don't mean any harm,
and there is no harm done. If they weren't
reputable-I assure you I've too much regard
for my own repute to go and meet them."
"If such conduct on the part of any girl
were known, it would call forth the severest
comment, I am sure," 1 said, tartly.
"If it were known positively that she had
come to meet me-or rather that I had come to
meet her-it would not be thought right, of
course. But I meet her accidentally, so far as
any one knows; and your American custom
permits girls to walk the streets alone; nor does
it find any impropriety in a gentleman's walking
home with her; or in their even taking a few
turns up and down Broadway, or on the Avenue."
i
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72      Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
But, from such small tricks as these grow the
very worst social sins which curse our large
cities. From these grow the vain, foolish, useless wives who crowd these cities; grow many
of the miserable tragedies which spring from
such folly and uselessness.
"If our girls were reared on the French
plan," said a lady to me the other day, "'.these
things would not happen. In Paris, a girl dare
not go walking in the streets without a proper
chaperon. You know that, I presume?"
"Yes-by personal experience."
"Indeed!"
But I cannot agree that the way to remedy
this evil is to restrict the liberty of the girl in a
matter so inherently innocent as walking in the
streets. I will go to a great length in the
matter of personal liberty.   What men  may
innocently do, women should be equally innocent in doing.
The cure for coquetry is not in any Rareyan
system of tying up the feet. If you cannot
approach the heart of any American girl that
lives through sincere and kindly appeal to her
sense of honor, your experience is sadly different from mine.
I 
Get Thtee behind Me, Satan'!
I would gladly welcome the day when communion of the soul and mind were as free
between men and women as it is now between
men alone, or women alone. Indeed, such
communion is necessary, to pave the way to a
truly happy marriage.   A  courtship of five
years where the parties have never seen each
others except at church, or surrounded by the
prim gentilities of the girl's mother's drawingroom, is less likely to make each acquainted
with the true character of the other, than seeing him or her subjected to a month's attrition
out in the busy world, and bearing with or
chafing under its trying ordeals.
There is a class of large-minded, well-educated  unmarried  women  of  a certain  age,
whose years and whose talents should protect
them from any such injurious and insulting
comment as " Guess she's pulling her cap for
him!" when they see fit to hold conversebrief or lengthy-with kindred minds of the
opposite sex. But, taking into consideration
what a large amount of human nature there is
in very young men and very young womenhow greatly human nature predominates over
science, metaphysics, or philosophical deduc     4
73 
74      Get Thee behind JIae, Satan!
tions!-I think it safer for young girls to err on
the side of old-fashioned maidenly reserve.
Therefore I hold it best that even an accidental
meeting between a young man and a young
woman shall result in no long walks, no perambulating of Broadway or the Avenue. Steer
straight for home, girls, or say "Bn jour!"
with a curtsey to your cavalier, and continue
your shopping expedition alone.
As for the Parisian plan which decrees that
an unmarried girl, or even a young married
woman, shall not so much as run across the
street without being accompanied by an elderly
relation, or a male or female servant tagging
behind her, I look on it as a sort of petty
tyranny.
When I first went to Paris I was a girl of
eighteen, but I was perfectly self-reliant, and,
knowing enough French to make myself understood, and above all to thoroughly understand
what was said to me, it never entered my head
that I needed any escort. In such broad, light,
airy and well-guarded streets as those of beautiful Paris, what need had any man or woman of
an escort in the daytime?
I 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
My first day out ended in an adventure. I
had walked far, and stood long, looking in at
the shops with all their tempting displays.
Glancing at my watch, I found it was late.   I
started for home.
When I reached the Boulevards, a large body
of soldiers was passing. I stood and looked at
them for some time, as company after company
filed by. As troops, they were gorgeous; but
dinner was a more attractive prospect at that
moment. I was tired and hungry. I wished
they would pass, and let me cross the street;
the number seemed indefinite; and on and on
they came.   I was growing desperate.  "The
first break there is, I will run across," I said to
myself.
Presently there came  a break, and  I ran
across. The whole column burst into laughter.
One man caught me by my shawl (they were
walking fatigue-gait, and so not keeping step)
and cried out "Hahahaha!  Wen a deliciouslittle-very-superior angel like this runs in front
of the military, they kiss her! Oh, but certainly! Else what good to be returned from
the Crimea, with medals and glory?  Hahahaha!
commencing by the officers, all the military,
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76      Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
they kiss her.  Allons!  Let us commence!
One, two-"
Before he could say" three," I had pulled my
shawl from his grasp, and fled like the wind in
the direction of my lodgings. My blood was
boiling! I gasped forth the story of my indignity when I got home. Old Mada'me B. was
there.
"But the harm is with you," said she. "Mon
Dieu!" and her shoulders went up to her ears,
"Is it sufficiently incomprehensible how these
foreigners act? My child, what thou dost in
thy savage New York I know not, but here, let
me tell thee, it is not convenable for a little one
of thy age, eighteen years-Mon Dieu, nothing
but eighteen years!-to be walking the streets
of Paris alone! The military naturally supposed
thee a child of the people, a grisette, some little
Nothing-at-all! What will you have! All alone
-in the streets of Paris-and not the least suspicion more aged than' eighteen years!"
Spite of this harangue, I could not make up
my mind to sit sucking my thumbs in a dark
apartment on glorious sunny days in beautiful
Paris. I had nothing to do, and an escort was
not to be had, for men are busy as elsewhere in
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Paris with pleasure or profit; and go out I
would. I was always plainly and modestly
dressed, and walked along with the timid, reserved air that is natural to eighteen-or ought
to be.
I was strolling along the Rue de la Paix one
day when a price-card on a necklace in a shlop
caught my eye. One hundred and fifty thousand francs! "Thirty thousand dollars," I said
to myself. I was always amusing myself in
changing imaginary francs into air-drawn dollars,
and the reverse. " Now, who in the world,"
thought I, "can afford to pay thirty thousand
dollars for a necklace?"
I leaned close to the window-pane, and riveted my eyes on the dancing beams of the great
white diamonds. They were superb. But even
at that age I was too practical to feel any desire
to possess so costly a treasure; and I remember
thinking-and thinking a smile with the thought
-that if I had thirty thousand dollars, or twice
that, no part of it should go to purchasing so
useless a bauble.
My reveries were interrupted by a voice-a
voice in which there was a certain quaver which
tells but one story-age.
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78      Get Thee behind Me, Satan /
"Wouldst thou like to have those fine things
there?"
I turned and saw a wizen-faced old man.
He was scrupulously dressed in the highest
fashion; elegantly gloved; perfectly bootedevidently a Frenchman of the best class of
society.  But he looked like a wrinkled dwarf
out of a fairy tale, to me;'and his question
chimed with my fancy.
I looked at-him without speaking. No one
else was by. When I had surveyed him from
his face to his feet with amazement, and then
returned from his feet to his face and stared at
it with more amazement, he spoke again.
"Because if thou wouldst desire to find a
well-beloved dear-friend - oh,  but he would
spoil thee, go!  Some fine dresses, a cashmere
-is it handsome, a cashmere?-also to  the
jeweler's one would hasten. Ah, when a little
girlette-under twenty I am sure-has a sweet
face, the eyes of an angel, hair all gilded, it
is very annoying to be clad in an ugly robe
quite past the mode."
It was my best dress, if you please, he was
alluding to in these complimentary terms.
Still I said nothing. And perhaps this may
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Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
astonish you. But you must remember that I
was as nearly "thunderstruck" as people genorally are, when they say they are.   I. don't
exactly know what it is to be thunderstruck.
Where -I came from the lightning strikes, and
the  thunder  applauds.   Else whence  those
"thunders of applause" we hear about? 
Bear in mind, too, that I was not fluent in
the language. In fact, I was so astonished that
I couldn't think of the first (or last) French
word. What I felt like saying was this: " Oh,
you red-faced, old, white-headed scamp! you
ugly, frightful, French, frog-eating dandy! ain't
you ashamed of yourself, trying to make a fool
of me, you absurd old Mephistophelean Faust,
you!"
Those being my sentiments, I naturally found
some difficulty in expressing them.
Will you believe that this old pest-a Decorated of the Legion of Honor, he told me,
proudly pointing to the ribbon in his buttonhole-who made remarks on my best gownactually cost me two francs?
Yes, I had to take a cab to get rid of him.
He  walked after me.    Oh,  I was  savage!
When he found I'd beckoned to a cab, with
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80     Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
true French politeness he sprang and opened
the door. I shut it after me with a bang, and
leaning out I cried, half choked with angry tears,
"Oh, you nasty old thing!"
Perhaps thinking I was bestowing some parting words of politeness upon him, he waved his
hat above his head with a graceful swing;
and the last I heard he was calling on the
Virgin to protect me, and reminding me that
fine clothes were handsomer than old ones, and
that he himself was none other than Monsieur le
Baron de Croquemitaine, ancient Officer, Decorated of the Legion of Honor.
If I did not speak of this episode at home, it
was because I believed that both of these adventures were purely accidental, and that they
were no index of what must inevitably happen
to a young woman walking the streets of Paris
alone.
Shortly after this I was walking with my guardian.  At  the Church of the Madeleine he
prepared to leave tme; he was going to his club,
I to visit the family of the excellent Monsieur
Vattemare.   Oh,  that lovely French home!
Oh, the superb old man Vattemare, enthusiastic in his efforts to establish-that which he did
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establish-an International Book Exchange with
America, thus filling Boston public libraries
with priceless volumes! Oh, the dear old
mother! fat and happy, working worsted on
canvas, as it seemed, forever. Oh, the curious
Abbe son, and the loving, amiable daughters,
my companions! Were Parisian sins and follies
fifty times more prominent and ghastly than they
are, the recollection to me of that one peaceful,
calm, happy home were enough to nullify with
its virtue and goodness all their evil.
My guardian had no more than taken a step
or two away from me when behold the same
wizen-faced old man who had so excited my indignation in the Rue de la Paix.
"Ah  ha! Once  again  the  good  Virgin
throws us together, Sainted Marie be praised!"
That was enough. I turned and ran as fast
as my feet would carry me, and caught up with
my guardian, who had turned a corner.
Of course he was furious; and after that insisted that I should have a man-servant.
The duty of this personage, who was easily
found, at a high salary, was to walk behind me;
and when he did so no one ever spoke to me,
or treated me otherwise than with the highest
4*
8o 
82      Get Tlzee behind Me, Satan!
deference.   That  cockade  and  those  white
gloves; that black suit and that fine straight
figure, were very effective upon observers; but
they bored me terribly sometimes.
In the first place, as I was a foreigner, Pierre
seemed to feel it necessary to point out for my
observation and admiration buildings with which
I was entirely familiar. Walking along about
two yards in front of him, I would hear a voice
crying "Madame! Madame!"
What is it?"  I would say turning quickly,
expecting something important had occurred.
"Madame will be pleased to observe that this
is the magnificent church of the Madeleine. It
takes eight men with outspread arms to compass one of those pillars. It is modelled after
a Grecian temple. Inside-"
"Thank you, Pierre. I am perfectly acquainted with the church of the Madeleine."
Sometimes I would look behind me, and find
that he  was missing., On  such  occasions  I
would stand still, looking about me anxiously,
wondering if the earth had opened and swallowed him, when presently he would come
rushing out of a wine-shop near by, his cockaded
hat a little set on one side, and his irreproach 
Get Tfzee behind Me, Satan /
able white gloves slightly soiled at the fingertips.
"Mon Dieu!" he would cry, with the most
innocent expression of face, "why, where could
Madame have escaped herself?"
I could hear him tell other servants whom he
met, and with whom he exchanged a word, that
I was "Madame la Marquise;" sometimes my
rank would take a leap, and I would be
"Madame la Duchesse;" and once, when I
had an expensive new outfit, it was "Madame
la Princesse" whom he had the honor to serve.
IX.
SPEAK I NG of expensive outfits, have you
ever visited Long Branch, and seen the overdressed little girls whom injudicious mothers
thrust into the parlors in the evening at that
vulgar place? Is it not a painful sight?
One summer there was one child whom I
observed particularly. She. was an exceedingly
plump girl of about twelve or thirteen, and her
bedizenings were worthy of a duchess.   Her
hose were silk, her boots were of delicate satin
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84      Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
or gilded leather, her dress was of rose or blue
taffetas covered with Valenciennes lace; her
jewels were coral or turquoise; her flowing
hair was artificially crimped; her full bosom
and plump arms were bare; her lower limbs
were exposed like a ballet-dancer's.   Every
evening her truly idiotic mother saw this infant
sailing through delirious waltzes in the arms of
an extremely tall officer of at least twenty-five,
and instead of trembling at the sight, smiled
complacently at the proud knowledge that, so
far as dress was concerned, her daughter quite
literally outstripped the other children present.
And it is easy to observe that these noble
feelings already have large place in the little
girl's throbbing bosom.   Her  eyes- ringed
around with black streaks of dissipation-flash
with delight as she observes the undoubted
superiority of her toilet'.
Her mianners are offensively presuming. In
a quadrille for which grown people are taking
their places, she spies a position which suits
her fancy, and rushing up to it edges those
who occupy it away.
She poisons the whole atmosphere of girldom.  All the other children must have silk
.,-i
. I I.I 
Get Th/ee behind Me, Satan 1
hose and gilded boots; if they haven't they
envy the wearer, and imitate her ways as nearly
as possible. She coquets with the tall officer
whose sword-belt is higher than her head; she
giggles behind her fan; gives a boy of fifteen
a rose out of her bosom; and, over there in a
corner, a grown man is showing her tiny glove
(which she has given him) to some ladies who
laugh.
She is the subject of conversation between
a couple behind me.   They are French, and
speak in that language.
"Elle sera sgduite!" says the man.
"Undoubtedly," answers the woman.
What a comment on the harmless pranks of
a girl of thirteen!  I turn and look at the
speakers.   They are a distinguished and elegant  couple.   They are judging her coolly,
calmly-but from the French stand-point, I am
convinced, and so I take the liberty to turn and
tell them. 
"Our American manners are quite different
from the European."
"That is evident!" says the lady pointedly.
"This young girl, I trust, will grow to womanhood, judge for herself the qualities of the men
~
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86     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
she meets, choose a husband, marry and live a
virtuous wife."
"Have we the honor to speak to a friend of
her family?"
"No. I do not know who her family is, not
even their name."
"She is a daughter of the celebrated gambler X.," says the man, twirling his moustache.
One is not a saint.  One has lost many little
hundreds at his faro."
A  gambler's daughter!  In the olden time
to be the daughter of a gambler would have
ben considered a position of moral and social
death. But it seems we have changed all that.
She is the head of this circle of children, the
queen of the set, and is followed by the children
of  people  bearing  honorable  names.   The
modest and pretty daughter of the President
of the United States is standing there in the
group with her. Her gambler lineage seems
to be no great drawbacks
In dress as in most other things the extremes
are not admirable. While gamblers' wives and
daughters (though by no means these alone
among our women) occupy the one extreme,
they are quite as near my idea of the desirable 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan! -
in dress as are those self-styled reformers who
would sacrifice all the graces of attire on the
altar of their ism-even as the free-lovers would
sacrifice the graces of home on the altar of their
ism; the difference being strongly against these
latter, of course, who are shamelessly wicked,
as well as aesthetically unlovely.
If I pity the little girl who has a rash and
foolish mother who permits her to be dressed
as the gambler's child was dressed, I also pity
the little girl who has a too timid and rigidminded mother by whom all elegance in dress
is tabooed.
With all our love for the little ones, we think
too little of their small world and its ways.
Your world of trials, troubles, anxieties, jealousies, fears, hopes, and joys has its little counterpart in the child-world in which your daughter lives.  If you think she is a creature without
emotion you are much mistaken.  She  lives,
she breathes, she feels, she likes, she dislikes
be satisfied if you can keep her back for a few
years from those masterful passions, loving and
hating. Let her dress be neat and clean, and
to some extent at least, near the prevailing
fashion. These things lie deep in many a
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88      Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
child's soul. Ridicule in the mouths of children
is to other children so bitter, so unsparing!
I remember when I was a girl, and going to
school, that the cape of my new sun-bonnet by
a mistake was made too long, and my mother
tore off a few inches of it, and then sat down to
hem  it up again  for me.   But before  she
"stuck the first stitch" she was called away.
For three days there was confusion in the
house; sickness, departures, arrivals; the hemming of my sun-bonnet was quite a long job;
no sewing-machines in those days; and for
three days I wore that unhemmed sun-bonnet
to school. It seemed to me I never was
"mad" and "didn't speak" so frequently in
my whole school life as during those three
days; and the hole in my armor being the
lack of hem to my sun-bonnet, the girls
speedily found it out, and thrust their daggers in it.
"Ahh! What -a sun-bonnet! Why  don't
somebody hem your sun-bonnet? Eh?'Father
sick, sister gone away, and mother hasn't got
time!' Then why don't you wear your flat?
' Haven't got a flat!'  Say, girls!  She hasn't
got any flat!" 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan! 
Chorus of voices, and fingers outnumbering
those of the witches in Macbeth pointed towards me in derision.
"Ehh! No flat! Why what do you wear
on Sundays? Why don't your mother buy
you a fiat? I guess it's because she's too poorehh! " 
With that the sun-bonnet was snatched off
my head, and flung from girl to girl with
laughter and contempt.
My darling mother never knew what I endured through that sun-bonnet. She will learn the
story of it for the first time from these pages.
She hemmed it calmly when she got time, and
I am thankful-for it is strange how well I recollect every detail of this trifling circumstance
-that I forbore to tell her all I suffered.
This lesson is clear: never force your child
to wear a garment which she has reason to
believe will bring her into ridicule with the little
world by which she is surrounded. If you will
not buy nor make her something similar to what
other little girls are wearing, she must needs
wear the obnoxious clothing, for she cannot go
naked. She is in your hands; you are her
mistress; she your slave; but she will chafe un
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go90    Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
der your proprietorship as all bondmen do, and
will count the hours till the time when she shall
be a free agent.
This brings me to a subject on which I have
already spoken and written quite freely, but
about which there is always a word to say.
I mean the question, What shall a woman
wear?
The women who as many as twenty-five
years ago set on foot the movement which
claimed suffrage as a woman's right, made, it
has always seemed to me, a vital mistakle when
they associated that movement with eccentric
notions of dress. Grant, for argument's sake,
that the dress they desired to introduce to
supersede the one which for centuries had
been in vogue among women, was beautiful,
useful, economical, healthful, and appropriate;
argument aside and truth to the front, it was
only a few of these things.   It was called, you
remember, the Bloomer costume. The excellent Mrs. Bloomer, with whom I have the
pleasure of being acquainted, denies with some
warmth having been its originator. She says
other persons devised it and wore it, long before 
Get Thee behind Me, Saotan!
she ever thought of it; but believing it to be a
wise reform she advocated it in the columns of
a newspaper she was then publishing, and by
this means her name got tacked to it.
It is an undoubted fact that many woment
spend much more time and money on their
clothing than they can afford.  It cannot be
denied that many fashions, pretty enough in
themselves, have been exaggerated by women of
poor judgment,' fond of outred styles, until they
have become offensive to the eye of taste. But
even at their worst the dresses now worn are
less ungainly, less unsightly, more poetic, more
modest even, than the stiff, hard-lined, castiron Bloomer costume. Scarcely a day passes
that we do not hear or read some denunciation
of woman's dress, its absurdity, its extravagance
both to eye and pocket; but the truth is there
never was a period when so many sensible ideas
were carried out in the clothing of women as at
present.
I trust that it is something more than a fleeting fashion which decrees, as it does at the present writing, that tight-lacing is old style, passe
de miode, not to be thought of by a woman who
pretends to fashion; that women's boots shall
9I 
92      Get Thee behind J[e, Satan!
have thick soles, and a heel which lifts them
out of the mud or snow.
Not many years ago nobody but grandmother
wore a dress the waist of which closed and opened
in front; then every woman in the house-except Gran'ma-from the girl five years old to the
mother of the same, with daughters 6f all ages
intervening, had to be "hooked up."  And
what a process it was!  I have hooked the
dresses of my elder sisters and those of my girl
friends when my fingers have ached for an hour
after. As for the victim, she was as red as a
lobster while the process was under way.
"Hold your breath!" was the common injunction from the hooker to the hooked. Without
bated breath there was no such thing as dragging together these monstrous instruments of
torture. Very frequently hooks and eyes burst
off during the strain, and then a slovenly sight
often met the gaze.   Underwear —sometimes
not too clean, for women had not the facility
for making these garments then as now-was to
be seen gaping through the crevices between
the hooks. No woman could dress without aid;
sometimes the men folks of the family had to
be called in.  Their strength generally suc 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!     93
ceeded in this pleasing work when every
woman in the house-servants included, often
called away from the wash-tub to hook up
madam and enable her to show herself-had
tried and failed.  " I've got weak wrists; my
fingers aren't strong;" these were the excuses
heard. 
Contrast this with the easy-fitting waist-body
of to-day, buttoned up the front in two minutes
by the fingers of the wearer. Shall this improvement go unnoticed?
And the shoes worn by women in that period
-you remember them, I suppose? Papersoled gaiters, laced at the sides, the uppers
made of some rotten stuff-prunella, was it not
called?-leather was seldom or never used for
women's shoes. Heelless, the woman's foot
sprawled ungracefully as she set it to earth,
and a week or two's wear burst the eyeletholes of the boots, and the untidy view from
the exploded hooks in the dyess-body was repeated on the inside of each foot.
And who can compute the number of early
deaths which have been caused by these two
follies! Many a woman has dropped dead from
tight-lacing; and many and many another has 
94     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
dra-ged on a miserable existence for a few
years to die of consumption at last, from only
one drenching received when she was wearing
these paper-soled shoes.
I have seen women come home after being
caught in a rainstorm so wet you could wring
them; their dresses dabbled a half a yard
high, and  flapping about their heels;  their
shoes so saturated that water exuded from them
at every step.  If the water-proofing process
was known then it was not applied to women's
cloaks. To carry an umbrella was considered
an unheard-of clumsiness by dainty belles in
the good old days, when, according to some
authorities, "women used to dress sensibly."
In this summer of I1872 not a fashionable
woman walks the streets whose parasol is not
equal to affording her shelter in case of a rainstorm.  Of course, also, it is a far better protection on hot days than the trumpery "sunshade," about as large as a dinner-plate, which
used to be in vogue.
Away back further than the days I speak of,
-before America was settled by civilization's
women, in Elizabeth's reign, and before that,
too,-if you examine the costumes of fashion 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
able women you will find nothing so practical,
so comfortable, so commonsensical, as the dress
worn by such women to-day.
The pannier and the chignon have been
carried to excess; but a draped overskirt is a
feature in Greek statuary and Roman painting.
Next to her elocution, Rachel, the tragedienne,
gave her most studious attention to the fall of
her drapery. And the heads of women are
tidier far to-day than when-like that of Rogue
Riderhood's daughter their loosely twisted
back hair was forever tumbling down.
"The waterfall and the hoop-skirt are to a
certain degree unshakable successes;" said a
merchant to me recently; "and it is so because
their utility is undoubted. With the first, a
lady's hair is dressed in five minutes and stays
so all day; putting her bonnet on and off does
not disarrange her hair. This you see is a
great point.   And  the hoop-skirt does away
with the number of starched muslin skirts which
must otherwise be worn to give a graceful contour to the dress. Of course, such skirts are
both heavy and expensive, and therefore undesirable." 
As I don't wear a waterfall myself, I can
95 
96      Get Thee behind.fe, Sataz!
champion the thing without being suspected
of selfish motives. I grant some waterfalls be
hideous-but there are some women who have
a talent for making anything hideous; and
therefore that is no argument against a good
thing.
Were I a luxury-lapped lady, with nothing
better to do than to keep myself sweetly beautiful
-to trim my eyebrows, and bathe my lips in
lavender water, and play the role of a mermaid
" With a comb and a glass in her hand, in her hand,"
I should like very much to sit combing my
"long hair" by the hour, of lazy afternoons.
But as I am a woman with something to do,
and for at least half the year am rushing about
the country, getting utip at unearthly hours in
the morning, bowling over hundreds of miles of
railway every day, and all the time under
vigilant observation by those critics of literary
women who are on the look-out for signs of
untidiness      I sometimes grow weary of my
back-hair  and  sigh for a chignon.   In wild
moments I dream of cutting off my hair
a la Never-mind-who, and joining the noble 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
army of the short-haired.    But the chignon
dwells most in my mind.
Here comes Rebecca. Let us see in what
way reform could go to work at her costume.
She is dressed in the freshest of half-mourning
suits; the underskirt just clears the ground all
around and is quite plain; the overskirt is
gracefully raised on  the sides, and  the folds
thus made are fixed in place with dainty
rosettes of the same material; the waist is
fastened with buttons up the front, and is so
loose that as she heaves a deep, life-giving
breath Rebecca declares that it " don't touch
her anywhere." A dainty frill or ruff of snowy
tarletan  encircles her throat.  Her dark hair,
with just a few threads of gray in it, is rolled
over two hair-pads which make a fine backhead, as the artists call it. Across her brow a
coronet braid is laid, and is vastly becoming.
This false hair is one of the things you rail
against; but dear Rebecca is one of the staidest and soberest of women, and she approves
of these harmless little adjuncts. We mention
Bloomer costume to her; she raises her eyes in
horror.  "That,"  she says, "would really be
i
97 
98      set Thee behind Me, Satan!
the absurdity-the vagary-not what we weatr
at present."
Do you urge that this costume of Rebecca's
may be pretty, but it is expensive? It is a
common black and white calico. There is no
cheaper wear for women. It was made by a
dressmaker with no'reputation fop style who
lives in the Sixth Avenue, and is cheap. The
neck-ruff was made by Rebecca herself in ten
minutes  time.   For fifty cents she bought
enough tarletan to carpet our back yard. She
will make ruffs for herself and for all of us-she
will draw out ruffs no more countable than the
eggs from a  conjurer's hat.   She will wear
that calico dress this summer without washingnext summer with frequent washings-'and the
next summer-well, it will not be wasted, be
sure of that. She will use it herself in the
early morning when she is dusting the knicknacks in the parlor, or perhaps she will give it
away, nicely mended, perfectly wearable, to
some poor woman or girl.  And remember, that
during this summer at least, and if it doesn't
get too much faded the next also, she will
put on that dress and with a neat black bonnet
and a pair of black gloves and her black parasol 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
she will "walk dat Broadway down" without
the least compunction; proving once more and
in spite of all cavil that this is the age of true
freedom in dress, when Rebecca's black calico
may pass muster perfectly well on the gayest
street in the world, and excite not the least
sneer or other comment though it jostle silks
and grenadines innumerable on the way.
There may.be persons who say that the
Bloomer costume was invented-not in these
days when women's dress is more sensible than
formerly-but in those very other days of which
I have been speaking when women laced their
lives away, and for the sake of small feet wore
death-dealing, paper-soled gaiters.
But the railing against dress still goes on; it
is a never-ceasing source of complaint. I cannot believe the objections raised then were any
stronger than they are now.
"Now just see how lovely Lucretia Mott
dresses!" said a dress-refortp woman of past
fifty to a peaches-and-creamy girl of eighteen in
my presence. " She dresses sensible. Why
don't you dress like her?"
The idea of the mob-cap and poke-bonnet of
Lucretia Mott-a  semi-angelic Quakeress of
*.
99 
100oo   Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
seventy years of age-on the head of this rosy
springy, merry, light-hearted girl of eighteen
who didn't hesitate to sleep in the martyrdom
of curl-papers for the sake of having ringlets the
next day, and who spent a great deal of her
loose change in buying black velvet ribbons to
tie about her throat to set off the' whiteness
thereof —was so ludicrous that both the girl and
I laughed.
"Oh, all the world knows how frivolous you
be in regard to dress, Olive Logan," said the
elder lady, tartly.
My frivolity in regard to dress may be plainly
stated as a settled belief, that so long as Youth
is beautiful, joyous, undimmed by care and
pray God that youth may be always thus, for
manhood and womanhood cannot be!-so long
as the savage woman gazes admiringly at herself and twists bright beads in her locks and
watches the charming reflection of herself in the
brook; so long as civilization's girls have advanced no further from the condition of the savage woman than to look upon a mirror as an
essential part of the furniture of their rooms
(black Sarah Hoggins required a looking-glass
in the kitchen as well as her bedroom); so long
io-.
.  I' 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
as Blondina knows that blue becomes her, and
Brunetta prefers a delicate yellow —so long will
Bloomer costume reforms, and Quaker bonnet
reforms, fall on arid soil where fruit cannot and
will not spring up.
The Friends know this well enough, and to
their sorrow. It is not the pure and beautiful
religious doctrine inculcated by these really good
and lovely people which drives away hundreds
of their youth every year. It is the austerity of
their laws concerning that which touches the &sthetic faculties of every human heart. It is the
lack of music, of sweet pictures, graceful statuary, harmless humorous books and conversation; and it is also the rigorous decree which
forbids the wearing of raiment tinged with the
hues which God painted on the rose and dyed
deep in the violet eyes of the daisy.
Yes, the woman-suffrage women made a vital
mistake in joining on to a movement which related specially to the social and intellectual status
of woman a side issue-more prominent because
norc tangible, more immediately to be put in
practice, than suffrage-which related to such a
comparatively trivial matter as the cut of her
IOI 
I02     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
clothing. Fancy a political party of men which
should urge as a prominent plank in its platform
the abolition of stove-pipe hats and the substitution therefor of good sensible sun-bonnets!
This is an idea I have frequently made use of in
speaking to audiences on this subject, and it
never fails to excite laughter and' applause,
called forth I suppose by the ludicrousness of
the simile. Yet I put it on record here as
the first and perhaps best parallel which comes
to my mind for the efforts of reformers who
want to link "dress reform" and the ballot for
woman.   This in spite of the fact that I personally was never fond of dress, and am growing
less and less so every day. Yet I know well
enough how to enter into the feelings of a girl
of sixteen; and if I can succeed in putting into
the mind and heart of that girl noble ideas of
woman's duty in life, higher aims than gossip
and ball-going, an earnest appreciation of her
worth as a soulful heir to immortality, queen of
the household on earth, a power in'church and
state, I may well afford to leave her her pink
muslin dress and her Roman scarf. I shall do
violence to her instincts, if so please you, in nothing; and I challenge you to try your plan witli 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
adozen girls while I try mine with-another dozen,
and if yours haven't all run away I warrant me
they'll be as fine a party of female Uriah Heeps
as were ever turned out to disgust a practical,
frank world with their hypocritical "so umbles!"
so -little fond of dress, so unselfish, so self-abnegating, so far removed from any of the wicked
pleasures of this sinful world, so unlike in fact
what youth, beauty, health and high spirits
should be-and what, thank Heaven they are!
spite of Bloomerites and other unlovely angularities.
X.
I SOMETIMES hear women in small towns and
villages and in the country say-" John and I
were in New York last spring and stopped at
the Greatenormous Hotel.   How delightful it
is there! How I wish it were my lot to live
from year to year in such a hotel-as women do
there; with nothing to do from morning till
night but dress themselves and look nice."
Oh, miserable plaint, born of tyrant pots and
kettles, how sad a lot it would be for the utterer,
could her prayer be answered!
I03 
104     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Let us spend the day with one of these
women, as her friends and acquaintances often
do. Arriving soon after her late breakfast we
shall probably find her small room looking very
attractive. It is well furnished; true, its proportions are contracted. It is up many stairs,
but there is generally an elevator in which to
mount. There are no books here, of course;
there is no room for them anywhere-not in the
chamber itself, nor possibly in the heads of its
occupants. The bed is trimly made, but passing near it you observe that its odor is not
freshly sweet; clean linen is not lavishly bestowed on permanent boarders, and to have this
room-her only one for sleeping and reception
purposes-made tidy at an early hour, the bed
must be made before the vapors of last night's
occupancy can escape.
You wonder where this woman with her many
elaborate changes of dress can bestow all her belongings. There are trunks about, to be sure,
but it seems inconceivable that any permanent
person should submit to that wretched fate of
travellers, "living in trunks;" should daily perform those most irksome jobs, packing and unpacking. But you see that her trunks are full 
Get Thzee behind Me, Sata!n!
to the brim, and to show you some new finery
she will go down on her knees and unpack and
repack a chest as big as a boarding-house refrigerator.   She has a wardrobe too, and by
that I mean the article of furniture so called.
See, the door swings open; how crammed it is
with hats, caps, coats, skirts, boots, shoes, slippers and dirty linen! What a nightmare such a
place must be! Of course it is impossible to
keep it in order. It is the catchall for everything. The room is so very small; and at any
sacrifice it must be kept ostensibly in order.
Now glance at the lady occupant of this
room. Her toilet is elaborate. Her husband
has been gone to business these two hours.
She did not breakfast with him.   She never
could have got herself up in proper style for the
breakfast-table soon enough for him. So, long
after he has gone, she has stuck her last hairpin,
given her nose its last dab of powder, thrown
one of those detestable suggestions of concealed
untidiness, a " breakfast shawl," over her
shoulders, and lounged in to a late breakfast.
A number of unappetizing and unhealthful
little dishes are placed before her, and she takes
a forkful out of one, a spoonful out of another,
,5*
I05 
io6     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
munches a pickle, holding it between her fingers, disposes of a plateful of hot, heavy cakes
running over with cloying "syrup," drinks two
cups of strong tea or coffee during the rmeal,
and a large glassful of icy cold water after it,
and then strolls with a pace like a snail out of
the dining-room.  She may have the'Morning
Trough" in her hands, and glances idly at its
closely printed columns; but she is really interested in nothing on earth except clothes, so
the paper-superficial and vulgar as it is-has
little attraction for her.
She is charmed to find you in her room; of
all her pleasures, one of the most delightful is
"talking." But this word has a limited meaning with her; it signifies chattering scandal, or
discussing the exact width of a flounce, or the
shade of an opera-singer's last new toilet. It
means pulling down the reputation of her dearest
friend, or carping about her husband's faults,
or regretting that she hasn't money enough to
buy more clothes, or glorifying the appearance
of some gambler or quack doctor who is stopping in the house.
You try to bring up some better topic of
conversation: you speak of the last new book, 
Get Tlice behind Me, Satan!
the last new picture, a bright, strong, helpful
sermon you have recently heard, now to be
bought in printed form; but she knows nothing
of these things, and you see plainly that she
does not want to know.
Finding her at the end of her resources, you
leave her.~ Absolute waif on the ocean of life,
useless chip floating hither and yon, what would
it matter to the world at large if this minute she
should sink out of sight to rise no more?~ Her
husband would miss her, you say; we shall
come to that presently.
As it is she finds tlhe hour high noon; the
reproachful sun once more at his zenith, showing
her a morning absolutely wasted. But that is
nothing new to her. It is the story of every
day. And, what is worse, the afternoon is to
be more profitless, if possible, than the morning.
Another hour before the looking-glass sees her
ready for the promenade.' Now it is lunchtime; but she has no appetite.  She has just
breakfasted.   She saunters out.   Her gait is
slow; she stops every ten steps to gaze into
some shop window and long for its contents.
By and by she reaches a New York museum,
and here she may enter free of charge. 
I07 
io8    Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
A museum of statuary, painting, historical
relics? Oh, no. One of those large dry-goods
stores which have no parallel in the world; and
which tell a truthful story to the thinking mind
-a bitter story of the Nothing to Do but look
after Something to Wear of American women.
Even London-' not a city, but a nation"shows no  such  Dress Palaces.    And  Paris
"magasins" are but small in comparison.
With a tide of other women she sweeps in
through the plate-glass doors, and becomes the
Torture you have read about, who bids tired
clerks drag down and open to her view hundreds of yards of silk, dozens of shawls, scores
of boxes of hosiery, piles upon piles of underclothing;  and leaves  this counter  to fly to
another, only to quit them all by and by and
repeat the performance at another shop, coming
away from all without having purchased anything anywhere.
And her reason for not purchasing is a pretty
good one. She has no money. Open her
pocket-book, and ten to one, you'll find barely
a'bus fare in it. She has never known what it
was to make or to own one single dollar. Every
penny she has had in all the years of her life 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
has been given her as you would give a penny
to a child. Her husband pays her board-or
runs in debt for it; he feeds and lodges herand when she wants a new dress she goes against
her listless nature so far perhaps as to sit on his
knee and twine her fingers in his hair, and kiss
him, and tell him of some lovely goods they
have at Stewart's.  If this is ineffectual, she
tries crying and whining, pouting and sulking,
and one or the other of these plans generally
carries the day.   In this noble manner she
obtains her clothing; and when she has obtained
it let her not fail to give thanks and praise, as if
it were an act of the grandest generosity on the
part of her "lord and master "-fitting title to
express the position of such a husband as this.
And when she has got her dress and put it
on, who is to admire it? Not her husband, for
he is away all day, and generally goes out in the
evenings to play billiards, or see his business
acquaintances in the rotundoof the hotel. She
airs it before the women, and perhaps carries off
some petty triumph there; but this does not
entirely satisfy her, and she looks about for other
admirers. She need not look in vain. All men
are not busy; that is, during her waking hours.
0
Io9 
IIo    Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Confsidering that he is a gambler (but that is
not considered, for it is not known), and is up
all night, Captain Frothingale looks remarkably
well during the hours he paces Broadway, and
stares at pretty women by the. score.   How
does it happen that this married woman is so
intimate with this dubious-looking man? She
does not bow to him when her husband is with
her.   Perhaps to avoid answering this very
question: How did she make his acquaintance?
Who  knows.?  I confess I don't-I can only
make a guess in the matter.  Perhaps by her
answering  "just for fun" his matrimonial advertisement, also inserted "for fun" in a newspaper; perhaps by his treading on her toes in
a'bus or street car.
"Treading on her toes!" That is a funny
way to scrape up an acquaintance!
Granted.   But it was the way a man  employed with sister Rebecca when she lived in
Brooklyn.   That was before we kept house,
but all boarded around wretchedly separate.
By some strange coincidence, sister Rebecca
would very often find herself next to this man
in the Fulton Ferry and Fifth Avenue stage
e 
Get Thee behind Ae, Satan!
downward bound; let her sit where she might,
before the journey was ended he would contrive such changes as brought him next her.
Then he would tread on her toes.  Well, put
this down as possibly an accident.   On  the
ferry-b9at, there he was.   She hurried to an
obscure corner; he followed her and trod on
her toes. In the Brooklyn cars he was there,
and his accomplished purpose was to tread on
her toes.
Now, Rebecca is not a silly, coquettish girl;
she is a noble woman, dressed in widow's garb,
modest and uncityfied.   But, really, when a
man keeps up a two weeks' course of toe-treading the most unsuspicious woman will begin
to notice it. She might indeed say, Well, in
the'bus it was an accident; on the boat it was
a curious coincidence; but the car turns the
scale, and proves to her that it was an intentional plan-he meant to tread on those toes,
and he intended her to notice it. Even if for
one or two or three times she remained in
doubt, a daily toe-treading will obtrude itself
on the most prosaic imagination.   And how
did Rebecca put a stop to this underhand
means of expressing admiration, this under
I I I 
I 12     Get Tliee behind Me,  Sz/an!
foot method of saying "I wish to know you,'
this toe-pressure, which was an insult, an indignity?  By remonstrance?-by appeal?-by
virtuous outburst of indignant womanly language? Not at all. By merely paying him
off in his own coin. By simply returning toe
for toe.  An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,
and a toe for a toe.  The first time he came
near her after her resolution was taken, she
gathered up all the strength in her body, and
concentrating it in one foot she trod on his toes
till he howled. It was an unsuspected advantage that he had corns. He never toed again.
I think it was the wisest thing she could have
done to express her contempt and disapprobation.  It not only rebuked him, but it was so
grotesque a revenge that it completely destroyed
the puerile effort at sentiment he was making.
And to think of prim, shy Rebecca doing it!
Verily a good woman is equal to any emergency
-even the unexpected one of having to toe the
mark in this manner.
By some such means has the acquaintance
between Captain Frothingale and the married
woman I was speaking of been made; or they 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
may have been introduced by some irresponsible
person.
I do not exaggerate when I say that a full
half of the women who are lodged in haremlike hotels, with nothing to do from day to day,
week to week, month to month, but dress and
look pretty, are carrying on a more or less gtuilty
flirtation with some such person as Captain
Frothingale.
It is not in France alone that married women
have lovers! The acquaintanceship may end
with nothing more harmful (though this is bad
enough) than a few love-notes and some lavish
gifts of flowers; or it may terminate in blood
and disgrace, or a bullet in the seducer's brain,
a lasting stigma on the woman's fame, a trial for
murder, and a verdict of justifiable homicide for
the husband.
But has this woman no children, you ask-no
baby to occupy her time and attention?
Baby! Great Heavens, you silly creature,
what are you talking about? What does she
want with a baby? What will she do with it?
-how support it? - It is as much as they can
do to meet their expenses now. Her husband's
weekly earnings (their only income, for the wife
I I3
I 
I I4    Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
earns nothing) are barely sufficient to pay their
weekly board, lodging and laundry bills. Every
dress, every hat, every pair of boots or shoes,
is an emergency to be met by desperate effort,
as emergencies are.  How  can they contemplate the expense of a nurse and baby?   Oh,
no, it is not to be thougnt of! 
Besides she don't care for babies-in fact,
hates children.   A baby would spoil her figure
first, and make her look motherly afterwards,
So the ungodly slaughter of an innocent takes
place.  Hush-sh! These are bold wordsbad words! Are they as bold and bad as the
deed?
And, observe, the harm these women donot by this one act, but by the general tenor of
their lives-is not to themselves alone, but to
the sex.   Men  see these women-they  are
prominently in the eye of men-they live in the
panorama of the streets much more conspicuously than the few women whom business occupation calls there-and men form from them their
estimate of womankind in general. Doing this,
it is easy to imagine how low that estimate is. 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan.t
XI.
ONE of my favorite illustrations of the
Bceotian stupidity of some women-but this
requires facial illustration to make it entirely
successful-is an observation of the lives of Certain wives of New York Legislators at Albany.
Every year the experience repeats itself.
Those legislators' wives (each with a big cluster
diamond ring on her forefinger) dress themselves in the morning in vulgar, rattling silks
and point-lace collars, and after each meal they
go and sit in the parlor of the Rataplan House.
Whether they have been guilty of that unpardonable vulgarity, getting up from the table
with their mouths full, or whether they have
cribbed a few rasins or figs or apples is to me
unknown, but certain it is that they are always
chewing. And as they sit at the windows with
dull, expressionless eyes, motionless figures and
lips that for hours never open (for they never
speak, even to each other), the resemblance to a
cow chewing its cud becomes so strong that an
active, energetic woman feels like rushing up
and shaking them, just to see if they will moo.
IlS 
ii6     Cet Three behind Me, Satan!
Or a mixed Tennyson flies to her brain, and she
longs to scream out:
Legislator's wife, who are not Vere de Vere,
If Time be heavy on your hands,
Are there no beggars at your gate,
Nor any poor about your lands?
Go, teach the orphan boy to read,
Go teach the orphan girl to sew, 
Pray Heaven for a human heart, and
don't sit there any longer gazing into that
apothecary's shop opposite, when you have
already counted a hundred times over every
bottle of Derry Pavis's Hair Killer, and Humbug's Fluid Extract of Blue Jew.
The arrival of the legislating husbands creates
a diversion.   It has been said that you may
legislate till the cows come home. These have
legislated till they came home to the cows.
It is such women as these who point the
moral and adorn the tale of those talkers and
writers who inveigh against the helplessness of
wives, the mill-stone-around-the-neck character
of women in general. Yet the very men who
make these observations would be the first to
frown down any efforts at self-support in their
own sisters or mothers; even in the women
they really purpose marrying. 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
One of the best-hearted men I know has for
his excellent wife a lady who was before her
marriage a saleswoman in a store. Now you
cannot think how it annoys that otherwise sensible man to have his wife refer to that period of
her life; he begs her in semi-humorous, semipathetic tones to "Sink the shop;" but she
will not.   She says the shop kept her from
sinking once; it may be her life-preserver again,
and that of her children.
Nor does her husband see the least connection between her shop-life and her wife-life.
Yet there is one; yes, and a close one. The
very qualities which made her a desirable saleswoman, and which she developed by years of
trade-life, are now brought in play in her husband's home, and conduce to his comfort. It
is the punctuality which was imperative at the
store, which makes her husband's breakfast daily
ready at the minute; it is the acquired habit of
standing long on the feet (sometimes carried to
a cruel and unnecessary extent in stores) that
enables her to keep about when other women
would be on their backs. It may be in part a
natural gift (but if so it has been improved by
her necessary computations at the store) which
II7 
II8     Get Thee behind  Me, Satan!
enables her to add figures with surprising rapidity and exactness, and thus save many a penny
from cheating or mistaken hucksters in the
market-place. Her trained memory, too, makes
her her husband's date-book. "Nellie, when did
such and such a thing happen?" And so exact
and reliable is she that if she forgets once, he,
who forgets always, is disappointed and astonished.
In painful contrast to the idle women who sit
chewing their cuds in Albany, or gallivanting in
Broadway, or living in the Harem hotels in
New York, are the thousands of povertystricken women who are stitching their lives
away in making clothing at health-ruining prices
for merchants who sell them to the first-mentioned class at purse-ruining prices.  The sorrows of these girls, the swindles put upon them,
the death in life they endure, have been so terrible, so palpable, so sinful that something like
an organized and systematic effort has been
made to protect them from the devouring
wolves who employ them.
And yet, at what cross-purposes do we not
work? If you ask me What is one of the most
difficult things to do I know, I will truthfully 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
answer, To obtain the services of a sewing-girl
in New York city. I stand ready at the present moment to pay a neat and dexterous sempstress two dollars and a half a day and provide
her board also, to make up my summer clothing; and for the life of me I cannot find her. I
am obliged to wait for a girl who is engaged
three deep.
I confess there is something here I cannot
understand.
(Yes sir-I have read your explanation; your
extremely logical, very reasonable, altogether
heartless explanation-and I don't understand
it any better than I did before, thank you!)
This is in spite of the fact that sewing is the
favorite trade for women, the one in which
more girls are employed than any other known:
it would be difficult to say why, except that it is
a career for women approved by men-perhaps
because, being so laborious, they are not fond
of it for themselves. Be sure tf it offered much
they would have a finger-ten of them-in it.
When men undertake to sell bustles and hoopskirts, corsets and under-linen to ladies (as they
do), holding up the articles for inspection,
spreading them about and expatiating on the
II9 
120     Get Thee behind' Me, Satan!
excellence of the cut, it is not from delicacy, I
fancy, that they refrain from the mere stitching
of these articles. They do not covet the needle,
and they are right. It is the last thing I would
turn to; first, because it is so laborious; second, because it is so ill-paid. If it should so
happen that I were to lose t6-morrow That which
I have earned and saved, if people were suddenly to stop coming to my lectures, apd publishers were to decline to purchase my MSS.
in short, if every resource which I have heretofore employed in earning my livelihood were to
be shut off from me, be sure I should not go
hire a miserable garret somewhere and try to
get some sewing to do; no, verily; I should
put myself at my comeliest, wear my cheeriest
smile, and stepping from one house to another
I should inquire in my choicest vernacular If
they wanted a Girl. Does any one wnt a Girl
here?  I inquire.   Go  to!  The  question is
superfluous. They waht nothing else but girls.
"Girls! " to the Right of us,'" Girls!" to the
Left of us is cannoned and thundered.   Cooks,
housemaids, chamiber-girls, child's nurses! Hey,
ye hundreds of superfluous teachers, ye thousands of ill-paid, under-fed sempstresses, fly to 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
the shelter of warm homes-nice kitchens in
which you shall be queen-tidy bedrooms
where you may lie snugly and have an extra
blanket for the asking-well-kept nurseries
with pleasant companionship of the children
you tend-these are all awaiting those who
seek them. Not a lady of your acquaintance in
city or country but has her story to tell about
the difficulty of getting good servants.
I grant you there shall be difficulties in your
way. I have already indicated some of them.
But when and 0 where, sister woman, do you
expect to find a way that shall be without difficulties? I testify that there is no such road in
any direction that I have traveled.
The only smooth path in this world is the
path downward!
But then, if you find it an easy thing to drop
down from a housetop to the ground below,
you are likely to find that the conclusion of your
flight will be harder work than any climbing
you ever did in your life.
Smooth is the road to ruin, but the end
thereof is rough.
6
I21 
22  Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
XII.
MR. TROTMAN sat on our parlor sofa, and I
sat on the queer little cane-bottomed chair that
Husband bought in one of the Rhine townsCoblentz, I think.  I sat there in froht of him,
trying to be polite to my guest, but with my
blood tingling to hear such pernicious doctrines
preached in such a lovely place as our parlor
was that morning.
The sun was shining in at the front windows,
making every faded bit of red reps glow like
woven rubies; the canary was singing such
trilling matins as must have reached to heaven;
the flowers were growing as if for a race with
each other to see which could get ahead in
magnificence, and win the most admiring exclamations-the most soulful  "Oh's!"  every
morning from the household;  the muslin curtains were as fresh and' as prettily done up as a
lace handkerchief just from the hands of a
French clear-starcher; Algie sat at the piano,
picking out a tinkling Sunday-school air in a
subdued key with his short fore-finger, but attending to Mr. Trotman,' I suspected, with both 
Get. Thee behind Me, Satan!.
his little ears wide open; and through it all,
through the canary's song and the noise in the
street, through the creaking that the little Rhine
chair will make when you fidget in it, through
the rustle of sister Rebecca's form as she
moved among the flowers with her wateringpot, through the tinkling of Algie's hymn, Mr.
Trotman's unpleasant droning voice sounded
self-complacently, as he urged the doctrines
of the "liberal" school which he had recently
joined.
Oh, the sunniness of that blissful morning!
The atmosphere was full of it; the flowers were
drinking it; the goldfish splashed in his globe,
and borrowed some of it for his coat.  Mr.
Trotman was in the only shadowy corner of
the room; the sunshine did not reach him; and
from out the darkness where he sat issued the
words which jarred upon me with hideous discord, violating the sweet domesticity of the
hour and the scene. 
I glanced at Rebecca.  Her tall slim figure
was draped in her slightly-modified widow's
weeds, and her wedding-ring and a mourning
ring with her dead Dick's hair, glinted in the
sunlight on the third finger of her left hand.
I23 
I24     Get Thiee behind Me, Satan!
Still she moved about, voiceless, tilting her
watering-pot over the flowers, and sometimes
stooping to examine a leaf with her careful,
intelligent eyes.
Sister Rebecca is the secret of our flowers.
She knows them as the scholar his book, the
mother her baby. Other people buy gorgeous
hot-house plants all in bloom, and pay great
prices for them; Rebecca is given an inch or
two of cuttings here and there, and when everybody else's flowers are dead, behold hers,
flourishing as luxuriantly as cacti in a Louisiana
wild!
Such imperturbability-even from her-surprised me a little. I said to myself, " Why is it
that I cannot be as cool as our Rebecca is?
Here am I just fairly fretting myself into a bad
temper, my blood actually engaged in boiling,
my teeth in biting my lips angrily; and that
cool, unexcitable, and altogether admirable
Rebecca is unmoved as a statue, as unfretted
as Father Time."
Politeness is second  nature to me.   It is
always easier for me to say an agreeable thing
than a disagreeable one. But for once I was
tried severely, in my efforts to politely parry 
Get Thee behind Me, Satain!
Mr. Trotman's vile blows at everything I love
best. The longer he talked, thed more the
difficulty grew, as, waxing warm in his argument, he waxed bold to the verge of indecency.
At last I said,
"Mr. Trotman, you surely do not mean to
say that when Mrs. Freelove claims the right to
change her husband every day, and that the
only restraint on her license should be the
limit of her desires, youtt approve her utterance?"
"Why  not?" said he boldly, and with a
sudden accession of heat. "I approve everything Mrs. Freelove says," and his eyes flashed.
She believes that marriage trammels the soul
of man, and so do I. She believes marriage to
be the mother of abominations, and so do I.
Abolish marriage and you abolish the social
evil.  If there were no married men, there
would be no fallen women!"
And here occurred that scene which has
made so much talk in our circle of acquaintance, and of which such exaggerated accounts
have got abroad. Rebecca turned suddenly
upon Mr. Trotman, raised her watering-pot and
sprinkled him with a little shower of sparkling
I25 
126     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
drops, saying, as she did so, in her cool, unimpassioned way,
Get thee behind me, Satan!1"
I thought Mr. Trotman would go through
the floor.
How he got out of the house, I scarcely
know. I am not sure but he vanished like a
stage-imp through a trap-door to an accompaniment of blue fire. He has never called upcn
us since.  I understand he is very bitter in his
sarcastic comments upon us, in the choice circle
where he is fond of passing his time.
XIII.
THE truth seldom lies at the-extremes.
In the matter of marriage, the Mormons and
the  Free-lovers  occupy  the  extremes — and
which is the more abominable it were hard to say.
The Mormon extrerfie amounts to the tenet
that the woman who does not marry will be
damned. The Free-love extreme implies that
she will be damned if she does marry.
Here, as usual, extremes meet. There is not
so much difference between Mormonism and
-0 
Get Tkee behind Me, Satan!
Free-love as might exist between a black cat
and a gray one.
Mrs. Freelove is not married, but lives with a
man in the communion of married life. Mrs.
Mormon is married to the tenth part of a man,
and to that extent she has the advantage in
decency of Mrs. Freelove.   Yet, between the
two there is nothing for an honorable woman to
choose. The black cat and the gray cat differ
only by a shade.
Neither of these women can ever know the
highest bliss this earthly life can give-the bliss
of true companionship with a beloved consort.
I pity both with all my heart. From what pure
delights are they forever shut out!
To soften the (as he calls it) harshness of my
judgment regarding Mrs. Freelove, our goodnatured but not very long-headed friend Sample
said to me recently,
"Well, now, I shouldn't wonder if she
preaches worse than she practises.   Trotman
says so; Trotman knows her intimately. Trotman says that one day he was walking with her
all alone in the Central Park, and she said to
him in the sweetest voice,'Mr. Trotman, I
appreciate how good you are to show yourself
I27 
128     Get Thee behind Me, Safait!
in this public place with me. I know how the
generality of people regard me. Still, I think
they are too hard-I do indeed. Sit down on
this bench, and I will tell you something.' And
then they sat down on a bench in a quiet place,
and she looked right straight in his eyes with
her eyes, and then she said, in a voice that he
would have taken his Bible oath was truthful,
' Mr. Trotman, as true as I live, I never"'  Here Mr. Sample suddenly blushed violently,
and stammered out "'pon my word, though, I
didn't think how confounded immodest that was
in her, till now when I've undertaken to tell the
story in the presence of ladies."
Wretched woman! to be so lost to modesty
that she has no shame in a conversation of this
sort, between herself and a young married man,
on a bench in a quiet place in Central Park!
It was a scene which I will match for you in the
first French novel we pick up. Heroines of
French novels-held up to the execration of
virtuous people all over the world- are constantly indulging in this sort of scene. Time
and place are exactly fitting. The beautiful
park-the seclusion in the midst of a crowd,
birds twittering their love-songs overhead, 
Get Thee behind  Me, Satan!
leaves bursting with warmth and gladness, the
soft winds wooing-the rich equipages passing
at a distance, the voice subdued to a tone of
flattering confidence  Get thee behind me, Satan!  The trail of the
serpent is there; we know its slime; you cannot
persuade us it is healthy moisture-dew, for
instance, or vivifying rain from heaven.
And be sure that I who write you these lines
do so with a full knowledge of how terrible a
blade is calumny. I have seen good women
stabbed to the heart by it, thrown over. into
the black waters of the river of Despair by it;
I have seen loving hearts sundered by it, loyal
confidence destroyed by it; households broken
up by it, the fair sun in, Heaven clouded for
tear-blinded eyes by it. " Give nre but an
atom of truth for a basis," said a lady witness
in a St. Louis court-room recently, "and I will
ruin the character of any woman in the world."
It is the entirely thoughtless, or the entirely
vicious only, who really make a business of
calumniating.  I am  as afraid of injuring  a
woman's character by injudicious comment as I
am of handling a kerosene lamp or a bottle of
oxalic acid. I am afraid of hurting myself as
-6*
I29 
130     Get Thee behind Me  Satan!
well as the other person. You cannot keep
clean hands when you dabble in the mud. I
like my hands to be clean. But you will
remember that it was neither you nor I, reader,
who went after Mrs. Freelove, looked in her
house and found two husbands there. She
herself came forth, introduced her husbands,
held up for imitation a plurality of husbands,
urged young girls to take any number of husbands, called upon the law to sanction any mad
animalism any sensualist's brain could devise.
It is not what others have said of her, but what
she has said of herself, that excites the disgust
and reprobation of every Christian man and
woman in this and other lands. What she has
done, is between her and God; He shall judge
her for that; but what she has said might pervert the morals of our little Algie, and God
allows me to judge her for that; and if this book
proved but a shield for that one-or any other
one-young heart, it were worth the writing.
Before I saw Mrs. Freelove and her Sister I
had heard that they were women who had been
engaged in telling fortunes to men in dingy
rooms in Western towns, and the general impression was that their own fortunes were as 
Get Thlee behind Me, Satan!
dubious as those they "told "-their characters
as dingy as their rooms. Knowing how cheap
is this sort of condemnation of women who.feel
that the washtub and the sewing-machine are
not their vocation, and that these are already
overcrowded with votaries, I paid no more heed
to these warnings than if they had not been
uttered.
It seems too bad folks will be so hateful,"
said a sweet girl of nineteen to me the other
day in New Orleans; "Amanda L. went and
got a place in the Dollar Store-the only store
she could get in, as they don't have girl clerks
in stores here in New Orleans, except in the
French quarter. She gets seven dollars a week,
and since she's been there everybody has cut
her-they say it's not respectable to stand in a
Dollar Store, and that she's lost her reputation.
Even the other Sunday-school teachers are cool
to her. She says, All right; she won't go to
church and Sunday-school any more. Church
and Sunday-school won't feed her, and seven
dollars a week will."
It would be interesting to learn whether a
lovely young girl who had really lost her repttation could not make more than seven dollars
I 3 I 
I32     Get Thlee behind Me, Satan!
a week out of what remained to her as that lost
reputation's equivalent, and not be obliged to
stand on her feet from eight o'clock in the
morning till ten at night in a Dollar Store.
If a woman tells me she is chaste I will believe her. She is the only person who should
know.   So fond are men of trifling with the
good name of women that I will accept no
man's testimony as against her own.
But, what do I care how chaste she be, if
she gets up and preaches the doctrine of unchastity?
The only time I remember hearing my father
rebuke my mother-it was  a gentle rebake,
more in sorrow than in anger-was on one occa
sion when, on hearing of the glittering success
of some wicked person of their acquaintance,
she made one of those remarks which rise to
the lips of almost every one, at some time or
another, that Vice seemed always to triumph,
and Virtue was often! discouraging business.
He told her that hie knew well enough she did
not mean what she said, and that she would be
the last person to gain fortune or position at
sacrifice of the very smallest of those beautiful
qualities which made her so precious to us all 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan.t
but, that it would be wise to avoid such injudicious and unmeant remarks as this one, for
there were young children about, who would
remember what she said. And to show that he
was right, here am I remembering it, though I
am sure I was not more than ten years old when
the circumstance happened, and no ones has
ever referred to it since.
And I remembered the answer, too! And I
remember that mother fully agreed with its
judgment, and reproached herself for her
thoughtlessness.   Dear  father-long in your
grave, where soon we all shall lie:-dear mother,-yet by God's blessing spared to us,-your
children love you and bless you, and thank you
for all your counsels, which have stood them in
good stead in many a weary strife.
Not all the tortures of the inquisition should
make me point the finger of scorn at any living
woman, and charge her witf being unchaste, a
free-lover, in face of her denial. But a woman
stands forth before the world and says,
".I am a free-lover! I believe it is my right
to change my husband daily, if I wish. I believe that a woman should boldly and openly
I33 
134     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
live as wife with a man to whom she is not mar ried.  I live with two men, one of whom is my
present consort, the other my discarded consort,
and I am not married to either of them."
I think with regard to this person it may be
said that Calumny's occupation's gone.
When an egg advertises its own rottenness, in
that language with which it is endowed, it is not
necessary for any bystander to explain wherein
it is rotten, or assay the quality of its rottenness.
I do not go any further than Mrs. Freelove's
own public utterances in dealing with the subject-it is not needful.
There are certain good women who associate
with Mrs. Freelove, and welcome what they
deem her aid to the woman-suffrage cause-not
perceiving that she is killing it, for the present
generation at least. And because these good
women associate with her, certain lookers-on
argue that Mrs. Freelove is good also-or Mrs.
Standfirm would not tolerate her.
Hark ye, friends-have ye all forgotten Mrs.
Standfirm's speech in the Woman's Suffrage
Convention of I86-, when she said, defending
George Prancer Brain, these words?
"Call Mr. Brain a lunatic if you will. He has 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!!
helped us nobly.   If the devil himself were to
come to me and say'Mrs. Standfirm, let me aid
you,' I would reply,'Thank you Mr. Devil,
your aid is very welcome.'"
If you remember that, as I do (and I believe
that the utterance is yet to be found in print
with Mrs. Standfirm's name to it) I hope you will
not again cite Mrs. Standfirm's good moral character (undoubted, to be sure) as a warrant for
that of Mrs. Freelove. Mrs. Standfirm has
given the promised welcome to Satan, that's all,
instead of bidding him "Get thee behind me!"
XIV.
qug tw~o woment whBo hxave made~ thaemsel,,es
principally notorious  in connection with free
love, I met, in the first days of their coming
before the public.   They were then  merely
women who had opened a new field of business
operation for woman. In such a motion as that,
every woman who has the welfare of her sex at
heart supported them.   I did, most cordially.
They said they were experts at financiering.
For myself I know as much about financiering
I35 
136    Get Thee behind Me, Satat n!
as about engineering, but if they had said they
had talent for the latter instead of the former I
should have heartily responded "Amen! Clear
the track! God be with you!"  They were
extremely non-committal in regard to any stand
for woman more decided than that which they
themselves had at that time taken; were not so
sure that the ballot was desirable, or womansuffrage feasible. Nothing was said in regard
to marriage, and I supposed they were what they
seemed; one an honest married woman, the
other an honest unmarried girl. My heart is
fond to weakness of young girls, and this one
even in a short interview awakened my interest,
and my tenderness. Daintily tricked in girlish
prettiness, she was to my blinded vision pure,
sweet, and lovable; I looked in her eyes and
shook her hand, and wished her well. That she
was chaste I took for granted. Can you not
easily understand how she fell from her pedestal
of purity, rolled in thie mud besmeared with
foulness, when I discovered that by her own
avowal she was a free lover?-" not necessarily
an incontinent," as one of her apologists explained, "but most decidedly a free lover!"
A person living in absolute iniquity, who yet 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
extols virtue and execrates vice, is less a blight
to the community than one who lives chastely
but preaches vice.  In the first instance it is
only his own soul he is damning; in the second
he is trying and perhaps succeeding in damning
the souls of other people. It is this which nullifies the complaint of free-love women that their
private lives, which are their private business,
are judged by persons who are no more moral
than themselves, and that these hypocritically
denounce them when they are themselves no
better. It is certainly true that he who casts the
first stone should be sinless; but even a sinful
person (and who is not a sinful person?) may
rebel with an indignation worthy of an angel
against teaching young souls that vice is virtue.
A  man has sinned —a woman has sinnedbut they know they have sinned. They are
perhaps sorry for it. Their daily effort is to
subdue the evil propensities of nature-to go
and sin no more. 
An argument which the Mormons  consider
especially strong in support of their position is
that it ill behooves Gentiles to be horrified at
plurality of wives while marital infidelity is
rampant among them, outside of Utah. It
I37 
138     Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
needs the fury of fanatics to make out such a
case as this; with a profound appreciation of
the moral failings of our men, I am yet fully
convinced that this infidelity is comparatively a
rare sin among them.  Thank God the great
bulk of the men of this country are Christians
who know and believe that the Seventh Commandment was meant for both men and
women.
But even those who transgress know well
enough that they are transgressing. The poorrich adventurer whose life of wild iniquity was
finished by his rival's bullet, knew well enough
that his life was iniquitous.   He knew he was
sinning.  He  asked and obtained the forgiveness of the sweet woman who loved him and
bore his name. And asking her forgiveness
was but a roundabout way of asking for that of
God. Perhaps he even asked that of God.
Who knows what may have been the remorseful pains which shook-his soul in moments of
seclusion?
But even he- who set social laws at defiancedid not presume to say that his path was the
right path.  On the contrary, I remember  a
speech he made which struck me so forcibly 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
that I am able at this remote hour to give the
substance of what he said as it lingers in my
memory. He was addressing some of the discontented ones among his railway employes,
and he said in effect:
"Boys, it may strike you as a fine thing to
wear a velvet coat, and a diamond pin, and
lavender-colored kids; but, believe me, under
that coat there may be a heart which don't
know what such a thing as peace or happiness
is. And I tell you if such a man did not get
into a sort of whirlpool which swings him
around so he can't free himself from it, he
would gladly be like one of you, earning honest
wages which he takes home to a good wife
and loving children at the end of the week,
and smoking his pipe with a free conscience and
in comfort. It might very well be that, instead
of you envying me, it would be more fit for me
to envy you. But a man gets going in a certain
way, and people envy him, when the fact is he's
leading a hell of a life!"
Even this poor moralist-whose practices
wyere notoriously bad, and whose teachings of
any kind were few-did not attempt to palliate
his wickedness by asserting that the hell of a
139 
140     Get Thee behind M1e, Satan!
life which he lived, was a heaven of a life, which
humanity at large would do well to emulate.
The worst effect of the spread of free-love
doctrines would be, the destruction of the only
mundane world that is entirely pure, the only
gold in which there is no dross, the onfy diamond
in which there is no flaw. I mean of course
that world of beauty, purity, domestic bliss,
peace, content, everything true hearts love
best-that central point around which circles
the best that there is in our civilization-and
which is all enwrapt in that little word, Home.
I read in the newspapers that Mrs. Freelove
owns a beautiful house in a pleasant quarter of
the city of New York. Here is the thing for
which the worthiest of the great mass of people
are struggling-the possession of a home the
ownership of a house under whose blessed and
protecting roof-tree all of their clan may gather
-where friends may come to visit-where that
angel of God intrusted with the lending of
baby souls to mortals may enter when he willwhere that other angel of God intrusted with
the glorious work of wafting them back to
Heaven must enter when he must.   All this is 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
hallowed.   Those bricks, that mortar, those
plumber's pipes, that carpenter-work, are not
merely bricks, mortar, lead and wood they are
the toiler's epic poem, his every-day church, his
shrine by the wayside. A tortoise and a snail
have their homes ready made; you and the
birds make yours.   And when you have made
it well, and keep it sweet with love, clean with
noble tending, large enough for all good impulses, too small for free-love and other kindred
deviltries, it merits whatever of affection you
lavish in or on it.  No fear of pagan idolatry,
of mere materiality in almost worshipping such
a home as this; it is the spirit which dwells
there which you reverence. Paper made of
rags of untold filth, ink ill-smelling, black and
vile, yon imp whistling "Tommy Dodd" as he
sets each stickful, tell me the story of the Ser
mon on the Mount. Christ shines up from that
printed, material page with an effulgence that
dazzles; and His very spirit clears away  the
grossness which might linger in the love you
bear the building-lot where stands your home.
Let us see how this thing we call home is
esteemed by Mrs. Freelove.   We  violate no
sanctity of privacy in crossing this threshold;
a
I41 
142     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
we have the testimony of the newspaper reporters who have called there for this part of the
story.
A body of men-mostly strangers to the
women they are about to visit-go to the house
on Sunday night. They pull the bell, and the
door is opened by Mrs. Freelove's' youngest
sister-a free-lover to the core, also.
"Come  in," she  cries, in hearty fashion,
"Come  right in, all of you.  Walk  into the
parlor.  It's all right.   This  is just  like a
political club!" 
And into this Sunday-night female "political
club" these strange men enter, to find a crowd
of other men and a few women, talking excitedly
on free-love, woman-suffrage, female presidency,
and like appropriate Sabbath-day topics. The
room is just what we should have expected it
to be; it is lined with big mirrors, and a great
deal of gas is burning and the principal furniture
is chairs and sofas to accommodate sitters.
We at home who sit cosily around our fivedollar second-hand Table at breakfast and read
the account  in the  newspapers on  Monday
morning, say to each other,
What a home!" 
Get Thee behind JAle, Satan!
XV.
APROPOS  of this gaudy home (if it be not
wicked to call it by a name so dear), the conversation turned on mirrors.
"Do you not think that Americans pay to
much deference to the mirror as an object of
decoration?"
"Yes," said I, "a mirror is a French importation which ought to be used sparingly. One
touch too much of mirror makes the whole
world a saloon."
Give me some white and gold, some red satin
and plenty of mirrors and I will turn you out a
bar-room-like parlor enough to freeze your
blood.
I grant you that these ingredients are geductive to the general run of housekeepers; but I
have tested them and know how unsatisfactory
they are.  At one period of my life I lived in
such a parlor as this. I do not mean I occupied
it in a lodging-house. I mean I was supposed
to be the mistress of it.  Do not ask me how
supposed. That would open up a history which is
too long to be printed in these pages, and which
I43 
144     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
will perhaps see the light somewhere else.
Suffice it to say that this place was my home.
An upholsterer furnished it from the hanging of
the pictures to the placing of the shovel and
tongs. Not one small atom of soul was in the rich
furniture and the soft velvet carpets; no tinge
of heart gleamed through the folds of the expensive lace curtains. People would come in and
sit down; and at first they would say, " How
handsome your parlors are!" but somehow
they didn't seem to make themselves right comfortable there. No woman ever brought out
her knitting and spent the afternoon; no man
ever lounged cosily, peacefully reading a newspaper or a magazine. Full of expensivefauteuils,
there wasn't an easy chair in the room.
It seemed to me as if myself and everybody
else came at length to partake of the qualities
of the furniture. Human legs turned into mahogany like the chairs; human forms were
clothed in red satin la'mbrequins like the window  curtains;  human  eyes  were  polished
French  looking-glass;  human  cheeks  were
ghastly. white moulding; human lips were gilt
and fresco.
All over this great country such parlors are 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
to be seen.  Here in New York there are hun dreds and hundreds of them. You know what
a good story Rebecca tells about her visit to
her old schoolmate, Harriet B.   Harriet had
been recently married-(six weeks before she
was married her beau called to take her driving
to Central Park; she flung down his card and
stamped on it, and made faces in the direction
of the parlor where he was sitting; then she
cried out "Darn him! I'd rather pull his hair
than go! ")-um-um-where was I?  Oh, to
be sure! She struck this good match on her
flinty heart, and he became a flame. So they
were married, and had recently moved into a
grand new house in Madison Square. Hatty
was famously stuck up about the satin furniture, and the pier-glasses between the windows,
and the big square mirrors over the mantelpieces, and her Steinway Grand (Hatty can play
"The Campbells are Coming" pretty well, except that she makes mistakes in the bass), and
she was very anxious to show Rebecca what
she had got in return for suppressing her desire
to pull hair. So, one afternoon, Rebecca called
and was ushered into the satin parlor, andvery naturally- she sat down.
10
I45
7 
146     Get Thee beihind Me, Satan!
Harriet flew down stairs to meet her, dressed
in a not over-clean wrapper, but then she said
she didn't want to keep Rebecca waiting, which
was kind.   They kissed, and Rebecca's heart
swelled with pleasure to see that Hatty was
so comfortably-or rather magnificently, housed;
for our blessed Rebecca has a heart as big as a
mountain, and she loves Hatty with all her'faults.
Being tired she sat down again, having risen to
greet Hatty when she came in.
But strange to say, Hatty didn't sit down;
she stood up most awkwardly, and bent over
Rebecca sitting there, and rattled on about the
no-end of fine things she'd got-clothes at the
dressmaker's, and three new hats, and a promise
of a Cashmere shawl from her husband, and a
porcelain dinner-service, and ever so much fine
linen.   But all the time she seemed so fidgety,
Rebecca didn't know what to make of it.
Finally she jerked Rebecca's arm, and said
"Becky, come look out of the window; I want
to show you something."
But there wasn't anything special to see,
and when they turned to sit down again, Hatty
took Rebecca's arm, and chattering inno cently the while, walked her over to where two 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
wicker chairs were standing, and almost pushed
her into one, and took the other herself.
"It was as plain as the nose on my face,"
says Rebecca-and mercy knows that's plain
enough-"that she was restless because I was
sitting on one of the satin chairs, and that's the
reason she didn't  sit down  herself.   Those
chairs are to be looked at, not to be sat down
upon.
Hatty is another type of American woman
curious enough  to contemplate.   She is an
almost ideally good housekeeper; and sew! oh,
how her fingers do fly over the material! and
she's as neat as she is rapid. She says she won't
ever buy a sewing-machine, nasty, botchy, and
expensive things.  She can sew fast enough for
her purposes, and likes her dresses made every
stitch "just so." And she bakes pies, and roasts,
and cleans and dusts, and rubs the brasses till
you can see your face in them. She can't keep
a servant long; not one of them is up to her
standard of excellence. She has paid for that
satin furniture long ago, by scrimping in the
kitchen. Her husband dines down town, and she
eats bread and cheese or cold meat at home.
147
la 
148     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Her husband is worth only about three hundred thousand dollars, and they are anxious to
get a little money together for their old age.
You'd never suspect these things when you
were looking at the house from the outside, or
contemplating the satin furniture and pierglasses from within, or meeting Hatty herself
dressed in a magiificent silk walking-suit with
frills and puffs and velvet headings and threadlace edgings innumerable.   You'd think that
costume  came  from Paris.   Oh  no-Hatty
would be horrified at the idea of wasting her
poor  husband's  money in that way.    She
bought the paper pattern for twenty-five cents,
ransacked every shop in New York, not to
mention Brooklyn, to get the material at its
lowest; then cut and basted and fitted and
finished it to the last hook and eye herself.
Judging from the European standpoint, and
looking at this elegant house from the opposite side of the way, and perhaps seeing Hatty
herself coming down the steps dressed in her
best, you would say, "This is the abode of an
aristocrat-well, let us say a merchant princethat is his lady consort; the house is full of
servants, male and fecmale, and dinners are 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
given there noted for reckless profusion, rich
wines and dainty dishes, thrice a week."
But if you could peer in through the roof and
see Hatty in her loose and unbecoming wrapper, munching bread and cheese, or jerking old
friends off her satin chairs and planting them
down on rickety wicker ones, you would perhaps
say "So ho! Mr. and Mrs. Sham live here."
I shall not soon forget the remark of a young
Englishman newly arrived who was walking
along Michigan Avenue in Chicago one day
long before the fire. He gazed admiringly at
the handsome residences, and pointing to one
which was rather more noticeably gorgeous
than the others, he said to his friend with a
sigh, "I suppose if you or I had but the silver
plate which is in that house, it would make us
rich for life."
He would have been surprised indeed to
learn that there wasn't a silver spoon in the
house, and that the master thereof was at that
moment blacking his own boots, while his good
wife was engaged in making the beds. Neither
of these occupations is in the least degrading;
but being ashamed of them is.
The Englishman's observation was based on
I49 
150     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
that wide-spread and excellent English custom
which ordains that no man should (because it is
unsafe) spend more than one-fifth part of his income for house-rent. But these Chicago people, in common with a certain number of people
all over the country, were living in a house
with such an expensive rent that ever'y quarterday they were half-distracted how to scrape
together enough to pay the landlord.
Oh, what a miserable soul-grinding existence!
Oh, what a price to pay for the shabby sham of
living behind a worse than grave-stone front!
You will be very much mistaken if you suppose that I do not believe in economy at home.
I do. I believe in make-shifts even, when they
are not calculated to degrade the character of
the make-shifter. If Hatty had married a poor
man, all those traits in her which now seem
contemptible would become virtues.   Having
married a rich man, and having assumed before
the world to keep up the style of a fashionable
lady in an elegant home, I don't admire her
bread-and-cheese ways or her little tuppenny
tricks one bit.
If I had a husband with three hundred thousand dollars (and I beg you not to believe that I 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
want anything of the sort), if I had such a husband as Hatty's, and such a home, I would
show my consort what money was good for.
Instead of eating bread-and-cheese alone, I
would have my friends to dinner, and give them
a good dinner, every day in the week. Instead
of spending my time chasing from shop to shop
to get a yard of two-penny tape for one penny,
I would buy books and read them, songs and
sing them, pictures and enjoy them; and in
every way I could, I would make my home a
joy to every soul that came near it, even to the
professional beggar-woman who makes her everlasting fortune going from basement door to
door with a basket on her arm, and woe in her
eyes —and who long ago learned the futility of
rapping at Hatty's area-gate, you may be sure.
Hatty hates beggars worse than Betsy Trotwood hated donkeys, and drives them off with
much the same frantic indignation.
As my lot now is, I wear my turned black
silks with a light heart, and thank Heaven that
by economies such as this and others equally
legitimate we have been able to get a home
which I love far better than I should ever love
Hiatty's.
I 5 I 
I52     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
I know a woman whose husband had, in the
early days of their marriage, but one white duck
suit; and it was in fact the only suit he owned
which was not too heavy to wear during a long,
hot summer. Now this nobly-proud woman
washed, starched, and ironed that one duck suit
every single night, the whole summer,long, and
sent hubbie out to his business fresh as a rose
every morning. She made no sham pretenses
in the market-place in respect to the large number of white duck suits her husband possessed;
probably no one ever noticed or thought anything about it except to see how sweetly fresh
and clean Neighbor Jones always managed to
keep; but I tell you that it is these little actsof goodness or the reverse-which make up our
lives and by which we shall be judged; and I
firmly believe that the steam of those nightly
soapsuds mounted as high as heaven; and that
for the diurnal washing, starching, and ironing
of that white duck suit, Neighbor Jones's wife
stands accredited-under the equivalent heads
of wifely pride, womanly devotion, and beautiful marital love-with a thousand golden
merit-marks on the book of the recording
angel. 
Get Thiee behind Me, Satan!'
XVI.
SOMETIMES people say to me "The truth is,
I am obliged to keep up an appearance. It
would hurt me in my business if people were to
think I am not well off. I must make a-show."
It was this logic (not mine, but that of another party, and I was overborne) which took me
into that ghastly, bemirrored, red satin and gilt
moulding drawing-room I told you of just now.
And the moral of the story would be lost if I
failed to mention that it was exactly this move
-of seeming to be in possession of means
which he had not-which lost my logician the
game. He befooled everybody so well, that he
befooled the people who employed him. They,
seeing the style he was living in, imagined he
must be robbing them, and so discharged
him.
A man who has passed years in a community
has lived an arid life indeed, if his worth and
excellence have not penetrated further than his
own household, and given him a standing
among his townsmen which money can neither
add to, nor take from. I should like to know
7*
I53 
154     Get Three behind Me, Satan!
if Henry Ward Beecher is valued by his community on account of his income? Or is it on
account of the nourishing food for mind and
heart which he lavishes for all men and women
who can read, and for the few thousands who
can get near him to hear? Is Robert Collyer
thought mnuch of in Chicago for any style in
which he lives, any parties he gives? Or is it
for the beauty which he throws into the life
which now is, for all who come in contact with
him?
I could name lawyers, doctors, merchants
who wield a similar though smaller influence.
No one cares whether they are wealthy or not.
But if you can afford to live in fine style, and
if you can lead a better and nobler life in a
grand mansion than you can in a modest oneif you can even do better work there, why then
there is no reason whatever-social, moral, or
religious-why you should not go and live
there.     I 
Sometimes we make great mistakes in these
expectations, however.  I knew an American
lady whose contributions to the English press
were universally admired about ten years ago.
Many-of her choicest effusions were written on 
Get Tltee beiii.vd Me, Satan!
the kitchen table; her thoughts on the manuscript, her eyes on the chops. Sometimes the
soup would boil over while she was in the middle of a word, and she had to drop the pen and
fly to remove the pot-lid. Time and steam
wait for no authoress.   Also, children have
little respect for the great thoughts whichmnove
in the brain of the mamma who, they know
from experience, can't keep a nurse-girl. Hence
the frequent interruptions from little tongues
which  urged  " bread  and  butter! " -" so
sleepy! " - " drink  o' water! -  " tell me
story! "-" take me  walkin'! "-"Johnnie bit
me! "-" me got tummach-ache!"
"Never mind," she would say to me, "one
of these days I shall have an elegant study, all
to myself;  quiet;  the children out walking
with a good, kind nurse; a beautiful study
hung with rich, scholarly, sombre blue velvet with a carved oak desk-and a leathern chair
which revolves-and a marble bust-of Pallas
just above my chamber door. Then shall I
bring forth work! true poetry, rich humor,
sparkling wit that outbubbles the wine on the
Rhine. You shall see! only wait."
We waited.  Not exactly for that transforma
I55 
I56      Get Thee behind Me, Satai!
tion which seemed as likely to happen as that
Aladdin himself should appear, and bring her a
blue velvet study and a kind nurse and put a
marble bust of Pallas just above her chamber
door; but because-unless we committed suicide-we could not do otherwise than wait.
And will you believe it? Almost before we
knew it, See-saw, whose poverty-weighted end
had been tipped to the very ground for years
with this poor woman on it, sprang suddenly
into the air and landed her high and dry in the
blue velvet study!
Not a detail lacking; the good, kind nurse,
the pacified children, the leathern revolving
chair, the marble bust of Pallas just above her
chamber door.
And the work-the true poetry, the rich
humor, the sparkling wit that outbubbles the
wine of the Rhine?
Absent from the roll-call!
She never knew how it was, but what she did
principally in the revolving chair was to revolve; the blue velvet seemed to fold about
her and smother inspiration; Pallas hadn't an
idea in her marble head; more than once in
despair she rushed into the nursery, scrubbed 
CGet Tzee behind Me, Satan!
the children's faces, darned their socks, and
gave the nurse a half holiday.
"Too much is expected of me now," she
said; "the oaken desk would feel itself insulted
if I produced no finer things on it than those I
brought off the kitchen table. Crushed by this
fear, I produce nothing.  Then, too, the room
itself is a constant reproach. It seems to say
'Here am I, madam, an excellent room, well
.ighted, heated, dry, airy and well-furnished-a
room which numbers of persons as refined, as
well-educated, as worthy as yourself would
gratefully receive, and ask no better housing all
the rest of their lives; and you forsooth come
here lackadaisically every day, and twist yourself on my son that revolving chair, or stare
impertinently in the face of my daughter Miss
Pallas, and yet do nothing further than this toward producing a masterpiece.  Come now!at once produce a masterpiece!"'
The rest goes without saying-cela va sans
dire. She wrote no more. Her literary ability
became a remembrance only-a once upon a
time-a long, long ago!
And does it follow from this that the sacred
fire keeps best alight near the kitchen stove,
I57 
158     Get Thee behind 3Je, Satan!
and the divine afflatus- needs "Gim'me piece
bread and butter!" from baby lips to win it to
life?
That depends.
But one thing is clearly proven; and that is
that a blue velvet study won't write your new
book for you.
-By the way (though this has nothing to do
with the subject), isn't it curious what different
influences affect different writers? W., when
he wishes to write, takes down a volume of
Emerson's Essays and tones himself up with
them, until he gets so fully into-the Emersonian
spirit that he feels like another Emerson himselt
-or feels that he would like to be.  His mind
pitched-like instruments at the opera-to the
highest intellectual key, he sits down and produces something better than he would otherwise
have done. Aim at the Bishop's gown, you'll
get one of the sleeves.  But for me, oh dear no,
thank you; when I have anything to write I
prefer not to attack such an intellectual eminence as Emerson. He crushes me. It is as if
Paganini were to get up before a young violinist
and play for an hour or two at his grandest;
then say,' Come now, let's see what you can 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
do." What would be the effect of this? Would
it not be to discourage the young man? Would
he not be likely to say, "Oh dear no, there's no
use trying. If violin-playing has been carried
with the aid of grand genius to such perfection
as that, there's no use my hoping to succeed.
I'll give up." 
I can only write by remembering that I've got
something to say-must say it. As for literary
quality, no matter-my audience will get my
meaning into their heads if I only aim at their
hearts.   So  I write-from  the heart to the
heart; and I am encouraged in doing this by
finding that I have at least as large an audience
as Emerson has;  not intellectual  prodigies,
perhaps (as his readers are, of course)-but
such as they are, God madethem.
XVII.
WE have been housekeeping about a year.
It is not pride of ownership that makes me
say we have a beautiful house; and when I say
beautiful, I refer to the beauty which comes
from comfort, from desirable "improvements,"
I59 
i6o     Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
improvements which really improve; not from
an imposing frontal, nor a mansard roof. Yet
there is gas in every room, the kitchen by no
means excepted, hot and cold running water all
over the house, stationary washtubs, great closets, large enough to serve on a pinch as bedrooms, and other snug household c'omforts such
as servants delight in.
For a week or two we got along with no other
servant than a charwoman-not that she called
herself by this, or any other convenient name.
She was Mis Cox, a married woman, charged a
dollar and a half a day and her board, came
late, went early, ate tremendously, worked the
reverse. We soon saw that we must have a
permanent girl; for Mis Cox numbered among
her other eccentricities a habit of not coming at
all, some days, leaving us in grave astonishment
and breathless breakfastlessness.
Sister Rebecca put on her bonnet and went
to what Mis Cox caled the Intelligent office.
What happened when she got there I know not;
but this is certain: when she came home the
cupboard was bare and so the poor dog (and
people) had none (i.e. no food, for I feel that I
must explain this). 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Eureka!   She has found her!  Treasure
trove! a girl!
She happened to be a middl-aged woman,
Irish, sulky. If she had been a wild horse of
the Pampas, and Rebecca had lassoed her and
dragged her to our corral with the rope hanging
around her neck, she could not have looked
more restive and discontented. We agreed to
pay her fifteen dollars a month wages and get
a second girl to help her as soon as possible.
And we-took her without a recommendation.
We thought it unwise to ask her for it, fearing
she would take offense and go away without
getting us our dinner. Rebecca was quite capable of getting it for us; but through Mis Cox's
defections she had got dinners and washed dishes
till she was tired out.
"Be plased to show me over the house,
Mim," said our Acquisition.
On timid inquiry we found our Acquisition's
name to be Bridget. Yes, she was the celebrated Bridget we had so often read about.
Rebecca showed her over the house, into
every room, every nook, every cranny. It is
just possible that in her pride at our newlybought house, Rebecca may have expected that
I6I 
i62     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
there would fall some words of commendation
from the lips of Bridget. If so, she was disappointed. Not a sound was heard, not a funeral
note.
At length Rebecca said: "You see there is
everything of the most convenient character,
water, gas, &c. We have just moved in, and
things are of course unsettled; but the carpets
are all down, and anything that is too heavy for
you to do we shall have done by a man. This
is your room." 
A  bright, cheerful  little third-story back,
with a clean bed, and a large soft rug on the
floor, and abundant shelves, and even a bottle
of holy water-left there by Mis Cox.
Mutism continued on the part of Bridget.
Nothing more remaining to be shown this
fastidious person, they descended to the kitchen.
Rebecca began giving her instructions for
dinner.
"You will boil this rice, please, Bridget, and
bake those potatoes; and-"
"Ye nadent tell me fwat to do, Mim; I'm
not going to shtop, Mim; the place don't shoot
me, Mim."
"Oh, very well," said our marvellously cool 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
sister (Vesuvius was nothing to me, when I
heard this), "but don't think of going till after
dinner.  You'll be hungry."
The ruse succeeded. After dinner was over,
Bridget slung on her shawl, banged the basement door, and left us alone in our glory.
Now for the sum of one dollar Rebecca had
purchased the right to draw blank girls out of
the Intelligent office lottery for the space of
one month, by which time she was supposed to
have drawn her prize; if not, she could gamble
in servant-girls for another month, and another,
and so on till chaos comes again, or her dollars
give out. But fancy the uninviting prospect of
marching in a procession of Bridgets at the
front door, only to see them march themselves
out at the basement ditto!
Once again Rebecca's fairy-like form confronted the monarch of the Intelligent office.
He was surprised that that girl should have
acted so.'She was a splendid girl-truly splendid! Unfortunately there was no.' another
girl in the place.
This was discouraging.
But he had others elsewhere; oh, yes. His
resources were limitless. He had a French
i63 
i64     Get Thee behind Mfe, Satan!
girl-at home now with her husband, but he
would send a note to her, she would gladly
come -a superb cook! Did we like French
cookery?  Should think we did?  All right,
then.  The only trouble  was  that she was
just over from France and didn't speak a
word of English. Oh, we had a lady in the
house who could speak French! That was
fortunate. Now, if by any chance she should
be already engaged, he had a German girl,
excellent girl, but she only spoke German.
Never mind, we had a gentleman in the house
who spoke German. Then there was no longer
any fear of our not getting somebody.
Rebecca was growing desperate. She told
him to send  us a girl, no matter what her nationality. O. spoke French, and W. spoke
German, and Algie talked Hog Latin like a
native hog; and if necessary, the first two
would leave their business, and Algie would
stay home from school, and the whole three of
us would go sit in a row in the kitchen and
devote our entire time and energies' to translating the housekeeper's orders to the cook.
By showing such an accommodating spirit as
this, the Intelligent man became convinced, 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan.t
that, though it was not for mortals to command success, we certainly deserved it. He
politely begged Rebecca to go home now, and
before long the coveted girl would surely be
forthcoming.
At the end of twenty-four hlours, she forth
came.
Would you believe it, she was  But why should I ask Would you believe it?
Of course you will believe it. You will find it
not at all difficult to believe. Such persons are
not rare.   They may be counted by millions.
But then to us it was such a surprise.   Because the man had not hinted at such a thing,
and there was not the slightest indication of his
office transacting business for these people.
She was Black.
Oh, but Black-even with a capital letter-is
no'word for her. She was a chimney-pot-she
was a black marble statue on a black marble
monument on a moonless, starless night. She
was hot, too, as well as black, and in perspiring
exuded ink.
Our geraniums thrive like weeds, and their
sweet odor fills all the air; but it was hot, and
Sarah Hoggins perspired ink, and the flower
i65 
i66     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
pots arose as one man, presented her the hilt of
their perfumed sword, and avowed themselves
vanquished.
She held out a torn slip of very dirty pink
paper, and though it was greasy- perhaps
having been used.on some occasion to wrap a
quarter pound  of butter in-we  managed to
decipher the glad tidings that this was Sarah
Hoggins, and she had Been living with Me 7
mons.   She had always found Her Honnest.
If anybody wanted a Honnest woman they
would Do well to engage Sarah for she had
found Her to-be Honnest.  Mrs. T. Jones.
We retired into an adjoining room to lay our
heads together.   The  result was: an extraordinary unanimity of feeling against employing a black woman.   Fully recognizing the
undoubted merits of hundreds and hundreds of
clean, intelligent and worthy black women, we
also recognized the extreme doubtfulness of
Sarah Hoggins belonginig to this class.
Besides,  Rebecca's mother  (our mothers,
though far away, were still our guiding stars)
had never employed a colored person; mine
had(, and didn't like her.   Algie's argument
was  couched  in  excellent      hog-English  (he 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
wields a good knife and fork, the boy does):
"You couldn't tell whether her hands were
clean or dirty when she was kneading the piecrust." W.'s was powerful and unanswerable:
She smells bad."
Now look here," said Rebecca, "let us be
reasonable."
We immediately proceed to be reasonable.
"Do we or do we not want a girl?"
"We do, we do!" chorus of Slaves.
"Then let us take this one."
"She's black!"
"What of it?  I'm tired out.  I'd take her
if she was green."
"Perhaps she is-green and black, too."
"No repartee allowed, because I haven't
time to think what to say back," says Rebecca.
"I concede the undeniable fact that Sarah is a
colored person."
"Colored! She's blacker than the ace of
spades!" growls Algie. 
"Well,  friends, again  I ask, what of it?
Why, good gracious!" and our quiet Rebecca
lifted her hands deprecatingly, "this is growing
political! Can it be that this dining-room is
an  amateur Senate?   Is the old prejudice
I67
4 
i68     Get Thee behind Mle, Satan!
against color again springing up? Are we
Southern  Oligarchs -  Dixian  aristocrats
pecunious Conservatives?"
We regretfully reply that we are not. We
are people with a big Wash on hand, and three
meals a day to get, and we want a girl.
"Then  take  Hoggins..   Let the' bells go
ringing for Sarah."
To  this we finally agree.   Whatever else
she may be, it appears Sarah Hoggins is
honest. Mrs. T. Jones asserts it. Who Mrs.
T. Jones is we know not, and have no means
of knowing. But we want an honest girl. We
do not desire that our watches shall be stolen
nor our pockets picked. Honesty is the best
policy! It is our best policy to take honesty
and Sarah.
Our minds fully made up, we march in to the
culprit. She seems far less concerned than we
are, and is adjusting her boot-lace with a more
extended display of dirty stocking than is
pleasing to an aesthetic taste.
She is certainly a grotesque figure, as she
stands up to receive our decision. She is exactly the negro wench of the Minstrel stage.
She wears an immense woolly, wobbly water 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
fall, and an absurd little hat garnished with red
and yellow flowers, pulled down over her eyes
and resting on her fat greasy nose.   Her dress
sticks up behind, and shows the heels of her
worn-out boots.  Her shawl is a flame-subdued by dirt-of yellow and red. Her fingers
are covered with brass rings. She takes back
Mrs. T. Jones's valuable contribution to literature, and opening her dress she sticks it into
her bosom. We now understand why the pink
paper was greasy. 
She grumbles at our fifteen dollars a month,
says she has always had sixteen, and before we
can answer says All right, she'll take it. Then
we tell her that we want her to get at the washing immediately; at which she looks surprised,
as if it were quite strange that people should
have washing. To be sure, she can't have much.
She goes upstairs to prepare herself, and
when she comes down she is so altered that we
think it must be another worman. The waterfall has gone off her head, and all her gorgeous
rigging has vanished; leaving her bare polesto speak nautically-enshrouded in a light and
dirty calico wrapper, cut bias, loose at the
waist, and trailing in rags behind her on the
I69
A# 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
ground. She immediately asks for a bottle of
oxalic acid.
Perhaps you think we were surprised at this.
I was; but Rebecca to my astonishment went
and produced what she asked for, as complacently as if it were the vinegar-cruet.
"She wants it to clean the boiler,"  said
Rebecca.
But as she never did clean the boiler, this
was a mistake.   She kept that bottle three
days and I was in agony the whole time.
I frankly confess here and now, that there
are two things I am afraid of: one is a kerosene
lamp, the other is a bottle of oxalic acid. The
first I expect to explode every moment; the
second I expect to up and pour itself down our
stomachs and kill us whether we will or no.
When Sarah returned it, the bottle was
empty.
Rebecca's theory'was that she must  have
poured it into the boiler-full of clothes. Everything was faded, torn, lay around wet for a
week, and became hopelessly mildewed.
Sarah soon developed an unsuspected ability
for heavy profanity, and for falling to sleep
every time she sat down. As she sat down
I70 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
pretty constantly, her slumbers were frequent.
We bore it all as long as we could. Then we
told her she must go.  She was furious.  She
said that she would be profaned if she'd gwo
without a monf's pay; she wuz a po' culled
guhl an'd been a slabe all her days, an' now she
had come Norf she'd be profaned if she'd gwo
'out her money.
Algie here remarked to her that she'd better
go before his father came home, or she'd be
arrested for bad language.
To this Sarah replied that as for dat profane
sassy boy she'd knock his excessively profane
head off if he didn't hold his sassy tongue.
Here W. did come in, and asked, man-fashion, "What's all this?"
Sarah became as meek as a lamb, and went
off up-stairs for her bundle.
While she was gone Algie told the story of
Sarah's remarks, and when W. went to pay her
he said,
"I'm sorry you should think it necessary to
swear, Sarah. That won't do at all. You must
unlearn that, if you are going to live in respectable families."
"Fo'  de  Lord,  boss,"  said  Sarah, with
171 
172     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
eyes as big as saucers, "I nevah cussed a
dam."
Sarah left her bundle in the basement hall
while she went looking for another place, and
privately informed Algie, who turned the doorkey on her, that if we stole anything out of it
while she was gone she'd have us'all up befo'
de jedge.
Whereupon Rebecca untied her bundle at
once, and searched it carefully for spoons. But
there were none.   We  had watched her too
closely.
Sarah got another place immediately (so great
is the demand) and in two days an indignant
gentleman came ringing like mad at our doorbell.   Honest Hoggins had stolen his silver,
taken his baby-clothes, and now he came to us
to know how it was we had ventured to vouch
for such a creature!
She had simply told him that she had lived
with us three months, and that we would give
her a character, and he and his household were
too lazy or too careless to verify her statement.
And now the clouds pass by, as black Sarah
moves off the scene, and we arrive at the moral
of this story; without which the foregoing 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
would have no point; and this is, the entrance
into our home of Norah, our young, gentle,
amiable, beautiful girl, our cook and our friend.
Norah had tried marrying, and found that Love
wouldn't boil the pot; that sewing-machine
operators were not in great demand, and not
well paid; that a sick husband was a bad thing
to have in a penniless house; so she procured
quarters for him, and prepared to pay his board
by going out to service. She is happy with us,
I am sure, and now that a widow's cap brings
out in its snowy whiteness the dark gloss of her
brown hair the chances of our separating are
remote. We are a little selfish as regards Norah
perhaps.   We  cannot but hope she will not
marry again.  It really does not seem to us that
her lot in life should be that thankless one which
she owns who plays the part of the strong vine
that upholds the rotten oak.
"But granting that your Norah is a superior
young woman, what is she, after all," you ask,
"but a servant?"
And what are we all but servants? You,
reader, are the servant to somebody. And I
who write to you am your servant. You) have
a habit of buying books at certain seasons of
I73
41 
I74     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
the year, and to reach one of these seasons I
must needs write early and late, *nd so serve
you. I serve you gladly, it is true. I love to
write. Ten books the size of this would not
hold all I have to say to you at this very
moment.
Again, I am advertised to lecture. I am
tired; my head aches; I'd rather not. But I
am a servant-contract signed and sealed, my
liberty for a certain hour bought from me, my
wages ready to be paid me when I shall earn
them. Who shall doubt'that I am a servant?
If I cannot serve you as well when I am
married as when I was single, you will very
naturally discharge me in spite of the strong
signs of appreciation which you'have hitherto
shown me; and you will be quite right.
Thus it often happens that a woman must
choose between marriage and service. Somewhere in the future let us hope there will be a
state of affairs so millenhial that these two things
may not conflict with each other so sadly as
they do in our day.
.i 
Is 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
XVIII.
DID you ever have a day of complete discouragement?  Of course, yes.   Everybody
has them. Longfellow says:
"Into some hearts the rain must fall,
Some days must be dark and dreary."
The rain has fallen in torrents for me to-day,
though the sun has been shining gloriously in
the heavens. I feel as if I had accomplished
nothing. Yet I have written eighteen pages.
Eighteen pages about Love-and I feel as if
I had been trying to dip up the ocean with a
spoon.  I crumple the eighteen pages in my
hand and toss them in the fire which burns upon
our hearth this cool evening in early spring.
How  can people analyze you, Love?   It
seems to me that the more I write the farther I
am away from any expression of you!
Love is so deep, so moving, so profound, that
my mind stands with a helpless feeling, half awe,
half despair, looking into the abysmal depths,
in which my heart wanders as freely as a child
in a ower-gar-den.
x75
I 
176    Get Thee behind Me, Satant!
I cannot think that it is always she who loves
most deeply who writes most clearly on this
subject.
You know George Sand has analyzed the
passion in its every stage; has pictured love
spiritual, physical, moral, immoral, material and
immaterial; yet her life has been sucfi a record
of free-love impurities that I cannot believe she
ever had one glimpse of true love whispered to
her by the voice of her own heart.
She has been beloved; no doubt of that.
Jules Sandeau (for whom she left her husband,
and a part of whose name she appropriated in
literature) loved her dearly; Chopin madly;
Alfred de Musset passionately.
She awakened so many sentiments in a man's
breast; admiration for her beauty, her brilliant
conversation, pride in her genius, honor for her
magnificent literary work. All these drew men
towards her. This man loved her because of
all her attractions; that other for some one of
them alone; and each and every one of these
lovers she has laid on a dissecting-table, and
opened every artery with her keen knife and
laid bare its workings before her class of
amazed students-her readers. 
Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
She has given us some rare pictures of love.
If she had ever truly loved, could she have laid
it on her page so clearly?
It was the current report in the literary circle
in which I mingled in Paris (of which Thackeray was the shining light) that she drew men
on to fall in love with her, one after another,like those lovely nymphs in Rhine legend
whom mortals love only to be destroyed,-that
she might have a new experience to present to
the public of this marvellous mystery of the
human heart.
We are sitting around the Table, in the evening. I appeal to the circle.
"Come," I say.  "My day's work has gone
for nothing. You must help me out. Tell me
something about Love. I will act as reporter
of the meeting. Rebecca shall begin. Rebecca,
what can you tell me about Love?"
Rebecca smiles in that quaint way of hers.
If you will tell me what Truth is," she says,
"I will tell you what Love is."
"Worthy of a philosopher, Rebecca.   Algie,
it is your turn. Give me your idea of Love."
For his answer, Algie puts his arms about
8*
I77
-F, 
178     Get Three behind Me, Satan!
my neck and gives me.a rousing kiss on the
cheek.
"Good boy!  Now, husband!"
"Apropos  of George Sand," says W.,  "I
was looking at her portrait to-day, in the Brussels album. On the opposite page, is the portrait of Jules Sandeau, her romantic lover.
They are recent portraits-I bought them  in
Paris last summer.   They  show me  an old
woman and an old man; and they are pathetic
pictures to me-the pictures of two lonely,
loveless old persons, to whom life must be a
sad and fruitless thing. This, it seems to me,
is a consideration with regard to Love, which
all loose-minded persons overlook. It is overlooked by such persons as Mr. Trotman and
Mrs. Freelove, in their disposition to make a
virtue of that fickle and unstable disposition
some people possess-to whom marriage is a
galling bond because it holds them to a steadfast loyalty against which they naturally rebel.
It needs no prophet to predict the old age of
Mrs. Freelove. It will be loveless; and a loveless old age is dreadful to think upon.   We can
do without love in our younger days, when we
are strong and self-reliant, and when the prom 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
ise of love rests ever in the future.  Even in
middle age there is always room for hope, on
the part of the person who is without love.
But when one has reached old age, and is still a
wanderer up and down the earth, companionless, childless, homeless, that must be bitterand especially bitter if, besides, the poor' old
creature has to look back upon a life crowded
with light loves."
I have known more than one such woman as
this, and I always shudder when I see another
treading the path where so many have been
lost. Vanity is the root of this terrible error.
A woman passes thirty, and is still a charming
woman; men flock about her, and, to outrival
early youth and beauty which surround her in
the shape of young girls, she throws to her
admirers an appetizing bait-an admission of
her almost conversion to free-love principles.
A fatal lure; fatal to the chances of young and
innocent girls whose youth and innocence are as
the healthful bread of life-men cast them aside
and call for the hot brandy of vice-fatal thus to
the men, but most fatal of all to the wretched
tempter-woman who is sure to be loathed and
flung away at last.
I79 
I8o    Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
I have known of many so-called loves which
braved society by an illegal alliance, and sought
to command respect by promising to show the
world a constancy which would amaze it. And
a few years passed, and behold a bitter, soured
couple, chafing under galling bonds, ashamed
to look their children in the face, hating each
other for having been the cause of this faux
pas, longing to fly from their companion, but
staying together because they were too proud
to confess to the world that it was right after
all, and they were wicked, sinful, and headstrong.
Sometimes an old coquette will have as many
"grandes passions" on hand at once as a young
girl has partners at her first ball. False to the
core herself, she yet rails at men because of
their inconstancy. I have heard such women
talk in a way that turned me sick with disgust.
I have known women of this sort who moved in
the best society and kept up an outward show
of respectability while they were carrying on
correspondences with married men (they themselves also being married) and whom I have seen
besot themselves with liquor and stench themselves with cigarettes, and then sit down in a 
Get ThIzee behind Me, Satan!!
half maudlin state and curse men for their infidelity; couple their abuse of the opposite sex
with profanity, obscenity, and sacrilegious blasphemy, till I have wept tears of horror and pity
for them.
Of course these women do not confess to
absolute criminality; every "affair" is going to
be the one affair of their lives now, and the
next you hear is, if you happen to be so unfortunate as to be the receiver of their confidences,
that that man was a heartless, faithless scoundrel, curse him! And there is another man on
the carpet now invested with all the virtuesuntil his hour for disgust and loathing of the
woman comes, and he too throws her off; and
so goes on the weary round.
A woman may sin and marry and reform;
purified by the holy love of a good man, upheld
by his goodness and strength, she may lay her
head on his shoulder and honestly look in his
eyes and not quail before them, so long as she
is true to him. This is a history often enacted
in real life, often touchingly told in fiction.'
Wicked indeed would be the meddler who
should dare to break up by calumny and slander
such love and repentance as are here presented.
i8i 
I82    Get Thee behiid Me, Satan!
I honor the man whose love is strong enough to
overlook the past of the woman to whom he
has made up his mind to give his name, to
whose hands he has resolved to trust his honor
and rely upon her-spite of her past-to keep
it untainted.
You have heard the story of the Marquis de
Boissy; (I think that was his name, but if it
was something else it doesn't matter) the French
nobleman who married the Countess Guiccioli.
The lady's name as given now was so piquantly
celebrated that many titters and neck-stretchings
were heard and seen when she made her appearance in society's gatherings.
"The  Countess Guiccioli!" was more than
once said in the'hearing of Monsieur de Boissy,
"Why is not that the lady who was the-ha!
ha! the particularfriend of Lord Byron?"
"The same, sir," answered the Marquis, with
a polite bow; then lifting his form to its most
erect position and lightly tapping his sword-hilt,
he added, "and I am the Marquis de Boissy,
her husband."
I never heard that the wife proved false to
this noble protection.
Poor railing woman! You who curse men 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
and their infidelity; who dare to sneer at the
honesty and purity of all men; who lift your
vile voice up and try to cast slurs on the great
God, who could crush you, helpless worm, inii
the very instant of your blasphemies against
Him, know now and forever that, spite of your
concealment, this very language is the banner
you fling out to the winds, which bears plainly
stamped upon it the confession of your impurity, that all who run may read. Repent
while there is time. Go and sin no more. Try
to realize that you are the one who has been
wicked; it may be that you have ruined the
virtue of some pure man-there are such, spite
of your weak, wicked and sickening ravings to
the contrary-tens of thousands of them.
XIX.
"BUT you believe in divorce, I suppose?"
sneered Mr. Trotman, with the air of a man
who has put a staggerer of a question.
Yes, I believe in divorce, and I believe in removing a cancer with a knife.
The operation may kill you; but as life is
x83 
i84     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
valueless when one has a cancer, one may as
well risk getting cured by the surgeon's terrible
knife —especially as, if the cancer continues, it
will kill you.
When I look around and see the unhappiness
which exists between certainly three-fourths of
the married people I know, my only wonder is
-not that so many people seek divorces, but
that so few do.
"There!" says Mrs. Freelove, " my argument exactly. The whole system is wrong.
Marriage is an absurd and cruel tyranny from
which earth should be freed. Men and women
should love when and whom they please. The
most intimate relations ought to be taken on
and put off at will."
It is a pet taunt with free-love women that no
woman who has been obliged to submit to the
cruel legal operation-divorce-has the right to
object to their doctrines.   As  if divorce and
free-love had of necessity anything in common!
Divorce and free-love are no more allied than
marriage and free-love; for one need not to be
divorced in order to commit free-love-since
that is the euphemism now employed.- Such
an imputation is enough to make the bones of 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
every dead divorced woman turn in the grave —
beginning with the chaste and lovely Josephine
de Beauharnais, divorced wife of the first
Napoleon.
There is an American woman, well known to
many who will read this book, and honored by
every good and true man and woman who aoes
know her, who has been three times married,
and twice divorced. She is a good and pure
woman, now preaching the gospel-a noble
woman, whom any household might be glad to
welcome under its rooftree-a most unfortunate
woman, whose sorrowful history might almost
wring tears from a heart of stone. Mrs. Freelove and her clan profess to feel mighty fine indignation at the fact that this woman should
repudiate them, scoff at their doctrines, pronounce their teachings wicked and pernicious.
But the plain truth is that this woman —spite of
her three marriages —is purer than any virgin
who should only entertain fiee-love doctrines,
believe them, intend to follow them.
You ask perhaps how it is that a good woman
should have thrown herself into three marriages;
this is not even pathetic, it is almost ludicrous.
I knew this woman when I was a child. She
I85 
i86     Get Thee behinzd JMe, Satan!
was a great beauty, and a sweet poet. She
was married at sixteen to a pork-packer, who,
report said, treated her worse than one of his own
hogs. Set free from him, she again married,
after a time. She was young, beautiful and, she
hungered for affection. A man who I am told
was as beautiful and as gifted as he'rself won
her love; but he was-I think there can be
little doubt-Don  Juan  redivivus.  Insulted,
betrayed, polluted by his atmosphere of debauch, she again appealed to the law to loose
this tie. She was heart-broken. Years passed;
and then a blessed, gray-haired man, twenty
years her senior, gave her his name, his protecting care, the blessing of his love.   You should
hear this story from her own lips to feel its full
significance.   I think  the  severest  moralist
among you would not hesitate to say, "Poor
woman, I do not blame you."
I am not well enough acquainted with its
details to feel warranted in attempting to tell
her story, or to illustrate how it may have been
with her, in the two painful, mistaken alliances
she was led to make, before she married the
good man who blessed her life, and whom she
mourns henceforth in perpetual widowhood. 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan.) 
I have seen so much shame and so much
misery arise out of those love-matches which
are made in youth's heat, when, the judgment
immature, the heart untried, life all untasted,
two mad creatures rush into each other's arms,
like two chemicals in a laboratory! When the
explosion is over, the smoke subsides, and'the
heart's fury calms, then the two mad creatures
look into each other's faces and see what fools
they have been.  "And  to think that I am
joined to this man for life!" exclaims the
woman.   "A pretty millstone I've tied around
my  neck!" says the husband.  And thenceforth they are obliged to trudge along through
life together, through joy and sorrow, weal and
woe, in relations of closest intimacy till death
shall part them.
Now in regard to a match of this sort, I hope
I shall not be considered unchristianlike if I
respectfully decline to believe it was made in
heaven. I know of several just such, that were
made in a boarding-house where I lived, and
very unhappy they proved.
One-ah me, how well I remember it! was
of a young girl, extremely guileless and unworldly, who, when less than seventeen years
I87 
I88     Get Thee bezhind JIe, Satan!
old, "fell in love" with a man who dropped in
one day to board where she did. It was at a
small and uncomfortable hotel on Broadway,
which everybody in it hated, but endured
because it was cheap. Of course he fell in love
with her first-wooed her with that delightful
abandon which prevails in boarding-houses and
cheap hotels, and finally gained her heart-for
the time, that is.  He represented himself as a
wealthy Southerner, at present rather cramped
for money from some cause or other, but a
wealthy man for all that, who would take care
of her from that time forth, provide her with
every comfort, and of course relieve her from
all labor. The young girl was earning fifteen
dollars a week.  She gave up her situation, and
married him.
Her family did not attempt to look into the
young man's character and antecedents. In the
first place they knew nobody who knew him;
in the second place, such were his insinuating
ways, that they bestowed their fullest confidence
in him, and would not have believed anything
against him if they had heard it. So this couple
were made one flesh-at least a minister said so,
and stated in a hurried voice (he had an invita 
Get Thee behind Me, Satani!
tion up town and was in a hurry), that no man
should put asunder what God had joined together.
And if God had really joined them together,
it would have been a heinous crime for any man
to put them asunder; but, knowing the circumstances of the case thoroughly as I do, I refuse
to believe that God had anything to do with
such a hasty, ill-advised, ill-assorted, and altogether wretched marriage.
The wealthy Southerner was proved to be
neither wealthy, nor a Southerner, nor a gentleman; but a miserable gambler, without an
honest dollar in his pocket, nor an honest idea
in his head, nor an honest sentiment in his heart.
You may fancy the girl's horror on awakening
to these facts, as well as to the knowledge that
her husband's love for her was a species of hotblooded fever which died out completely after
three months of matrimony. But the saddest
discovery of all was the discovery of her own
feelings concerning the man to whom she was
joined for life. The veil dropped from her eyes,
and showed her the appalling truth-that she
hated her husband.
Will anybody say this match was made in
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9go     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
heaven? Were these people really joined by
God? I think it blasphemy to say so.
If it be that Satan has anything to do with
making disjointed marriages-as he no doubt
has with every kind of sin-I should say he was
the prime-mover in joining these people.
Ten thousand such marriages take place every
year. In their train they bring untold agonies,
remorse, chafing under the galling yoke and not
unfrequently insanity, infamy and violent death.
What then?   Is the fault with marriage?
Shall we then condemn marriage?
Why, you poor, trivial creature, you might
as well infer that it is the fault of religion that a
hypocrite derives no good from his religious
professions. You might as well condemn trutht
because you, having heard that truth lay at the
bottom of a well, had jumped into a well in
search of it, and drowned yourself.
When marriage fails to be a blessing to us,
the fault lies primarily in ourselves.   We  are
the sufferers from our own folly, our own vanity,
our own weakness or wickedness.  The cancer
has grown in our breasts, because we ourselves
planted it there.
When Mrs. Freelove assails marriage, she
. 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
assails an institution as essential to our civilization  as  law  itself.  If you  can  safely
abolish all law, then you can abolish marriage.
-Ah, but this is not all-no, no!  When I
contemplate the idea of your abolishing the
marriage of people who love - and I know
many such-even to repealing the law which
makes it a virtue in both husband and wife to
obey the promptings of their natures-I feel
that you  would  rob them  of something  I
and they cannot name, but for which there is
no recompense! Why, rash iconoclast, people
who love and are married'kiss with joy the
gyve which binds them together!
There is no resisting Love, when Heaven
smiles upon.the lovers.:  Not all the votes that
were ever cast, from Washington's day down
to Tweed's,-and counting the repeating done,
this is a considerable numrnber, —will ever change
this fact.  Free-love reformers might as well
try to legislate child-bearing to the other sex as to
hope to change a sentiment as immutable as death.
My only conception of God is-not the Great
Jehovah who rules the spheres, and holds the
waters in the hollow of his hand-but a good
Father who will love me, and rest me.
I9I 
192    Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
A person who knew Wilberforce once told
me that the only way he could picture to himself Christ was to say to himself, "Jesus is
Wilberforce millions of times improved. And
He will love me and comfort me as Wilberforce
did —but immeasurably more."
In fact, there is nothing on earth worth living
for but love; nothing so beautiful, nothing so
rare. Give it as freely as you can-give it to
mother, father, sister, brother, child, friend-but
you can give it but once to a husband.
XX.
IN some way, somehow, somewhere, a woman must be her husband's partner-or take the
consequence: contempt. To what degree, and
in what kind, depends on many circumstances.
For example, a man may be so splendidly
framed by his Makers that he is capable of
being just. There are such men in the world;
but they are rare. Such a man may perceive
that his wife, while lacking in certain qualities
wherein he is strong, equalizes her lack therein
by the possession of other qualities wherein he 
Get Thee behind Me, Satant!
is weak. This, to begin with, opens the window which ventilates a home with pure air, in
which contempt cannot live.
Happy is the lot of the wife whose marriage
bond was wrought in heaven! For the condition of all such, God be praised! They have
no need of the benefits which attach to ability
to care for one's self, until-ah, yes! until the
good husband dies, or changes from goodness
into its reverse-as it is in the nature of poor
humanity to do-until the yoke presses hard on
the feeble neck, and the woman realizes that
bitter is the lot of woman. When she lays her
husband in the grave-either in the actual graveyard mould of physical death, or the tomb of
dead virtue, dead faithfulness, dead honor, the
weeds of drunkenness, debauchery, and shame
rioting over him-then, when the question arises
"How to earn my own and my children's daily
bread," she learns the misfortune of being
a dependent woman.
If the fault were simply in woman as woman,
instead of in the position of woman, there would
be less to say. But, I indignantly deny that
woman's weakness is in her sex. The refutation
of this libel is found in ten thousand instances,
9
I93 
I94     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
where woman has risen above her common
position of dependence, and has proved herself
equal to such work as man is equal to.
Blessed be the woman who is wedded to manhood, honor, intelligence, virtue, justice! But,
shame upon the woman who is thus blest, if she,
in a selfishness which is beyond all other selfishness on earth, shall be false to the spirit of
grand and beneficent principle! So one might
cry, "I have no need of charity-away with
charity! charity  is insolence  to me!"  But
others may need it.
Many women, from sheer mental laziness, are
opposed to any improvement in the condition
of their sex.  They look over the newspapers,
and, being unable to comprehend clearly the
drift of certain great questions, because they
have never taken the pains to study them, they
think political and social science an occult
mystery, which it would be hopeless in them to
ever dream of penetrating. So they determine
not to expose their own ignorance, but to conceal it under a mean cry of —" Woman's sphere
is the kitchen! Any woman is unsexed who
meddles with higher questions than soup and
stuffing." 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Sometimes they affect a sweet simplicity, and
simper something like this
"Oh,  those  coarse  creatures  who  have
brains  in their heads!   I've  not got any
brains in my head, so I'm not coarse. I'm a
sweet and simple little idiot that don't know
whether politics is something to drink or a sort
of garment. I hear so much about turn-coats,
you know.   He! he!  I don't know anything.
Don't you admire me, sir?"
And this woman finds men who pat her on
the head, as they would any other frisky little
puppy, male or female, quadruped or biped.
No doubt the Turkish seraglio slave-woman
thinks her degraded position the proper sphere for
her sex, and WVould hoot at any one who proposed
a change in that position. No doubt she would
declare a woman "unsexed" who should dare to
violate the old established routine of life there, and
pronounce the bowstring the proper reward for
her immodest conduct in seeking a larger liberty.
And apropos of this, an anecdote:
When I was residing in Paris, a dressmaker,
who used to work for me, received one day a
large order for dresses for some oriental women
kept in a seraglio in Algiers. The dress-of
I95 
r96     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
which patterns were sent her-consisted of a
loose gored sack, open in front, falling to the
knee, and flowing trousers  underneath this,
gathered at the ankle. Everything was to be
made  of the most expensive material   silk,
satin, gauze, gossamer-and it was stipulated
that the lining of both trousers and sack was
to be as rich, costly, and perfectly finished off
as the outside.
The job was a profitable one, and to be sure
of pleasing her employers and thus securing
further custom from them, the dressmaker sent
her eldest daughter (a young married woman)
to Algiers, to deliver the articles. When she
returned, Marie told me  that  the  Algerian
women received their things like babiesclapping their hands and dancing with joy over
them. But they presently turned'their attention to the woman who brought them; and
when they found she had walked through -the
streets without a veil, such as they wore around
their heads, leaving nothing but their eyes
visible, they called her all sorts of vile names,
charged her with being lost to virtue, slapped
her face, and turned her out of their presence.
It is but a narrow intelligence which is unable 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
to separate the aims of honor-loving and
virtue-cherishing women from those of free-love
advocates, merely because they both believe in
changes in woman's status.   God knows, I
wage no war upon the comfortable lot she
occupies, whose husband's love is all to her,
and enough for all her wants.  Rest contented ~
in your pleasant nest, dear! But don't shake
your pretty little head disapprovingly at women
whose objects in life are beneficent for your
sex, however little you may think they are for
you. Your time of need may come, it is true.
I hope it may not. But if it should, I hope also
that you may not find yourself unable to earn
your livelihood.
There are undoubtedly men in the world who
do not want their wives to work. And if, in
the great scheme of existence, there were one
such man to marry every woman, there would
be less occasion for the discussion of woman's
needs.   Yet if there  be one woman  in this
world, who hath no such husband to save
her from the necessity of toil, that one woman's
case is to be provided for in some other way.
And what is the fact?
Why the fact is that there are thbusands and
I97 
98g    - Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
thousands of such women.   The avenues of
labor are thronged with such women, struggling
with inefficient powers against the hard fate of
poverty, which is always crowding them into
temptation's paths; and the grand army of sin
and shame is constantly recruited from their
ranks 
XXI.
AND motherhood! What of this question of
child-bearing, and child-tending, which comes
with marriage?
If we were living in a state of ideal civilization, I should not have to put on record the
hard truths which belong to this subject. I
should be able to speak of motherhood sweetly,
poetically, as the holy and blessed thing it is,
and draw you such fair pictures of the ideal
mother and child as should make your heart
glad  with  admiration.   But  the truth  is,
motherhood is in this day and country practically received as a doubtful blessing by most
women. Why? 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
"It isn't the first of it I care so much about,"
said an expectant mother to me recently, "but
it is the long years —three, four, or five —during which I must be at the mercy of the
child."
It is because there is so much slavery put on
the mother which need not be put there, that so
many women look forward with something very
like dread to the prospect of motherhood.
I have before printed my views on the absurdity of insisting that a strong, active-brained,
labor-competent woman, should be compelled
by the force of custom to sit for hours holding
a baby on her knees to the exclusion of every
other employment.
I have been thought hard in this matter —
lacking in that innate adoration of babyhood
which should inspire the soul of every true
woman.
But those who think I can see no charms in
babyhood, know not my inmost heart. I suppose I am as instinctively an idolater in this
sphere as most women are.
But because I love Baby, I would serve him.
I see that Baby is not so flourishing an institution in these days, and in this country, as he
-I99 
200    Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
was in other days, and is in some other countries.
And the reason may be perceiveeby the naked
eye, by any intelligent person who will look at
it without green goggles of prejudice on. In
those other countries Baby is not the incubus
upon woman's energies that he is in this country.
A money-earning European mother would
never think of giving up her employment to sit
and hold her baby. I know that there have
been many abuses relating to paid baby-tending
in Europe; but if we should adopt anything
like their system, we could enact such laws as
European mistakes have taught us to be necessary. But these abuses can only exist when
the mother is so unfortunate as to be obliged to
put her child Out in the country-away from
her-to nurse, along with a number of other
babies who are all expected to eke out a scanty
sustenance from the bosom of a common nursemother.  I am speaking now on behalf of dressmakers, milliners, copyists, and a large number
of women engaged in employment which they
do at home, but which custom exacts they shall
immediately relinquish when  baby comes
leaving the getting of very necessary income to
devote their whole time to holding baby on 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
their knees, or getting down on the floor and
playing with him.
There are so many poor women and girls in
this world —so many classes to whom a dollar is
a large sum —that I hold it to be the duty of
every woman who can do service in a high path
of labor, to hire some poorer woman to perform the necessary details of a lower one. A
woman who is capable of earning five dollars
by her work for half an hour, is a dunce if she
devotes that half-hour to saving fifty cents. It
is all wrong, this sort of economy. I myself
have kept the printer waiting while I was preparing clothes for the wash; I have spent two
whole days turning and twisting an old dress,
when I mnight have made enough to buy me a
new one and pay for the making of it by
writing a newspaper article. These were the
mistakes which opened my eyes and made me
see the folly which I would be glad to keep
other women from running into. My preparing
of the clothes for the wash was not one whit
better, and my re-making of the old dress was
not so good, as would have been that of some
woman who was incapable of writing the magazine article, and to whom but a portion of the
9*
20I 
202     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
money I earned by the other and more congenial work would have been a God-send.
Let the husband of the woman who is expecting to be a mother say to her, "Now dear,
come what may, you shall have a nurse-girl to
help you take care of that baby. Under your
eye a girl a dozen years old, whose services
may be had for a trifle, will help amazingly to
relieve you of the ceaseless fatigue and care."
Such a girl can, at the beginning, rock a
cradle and run certain errands which a baby
always brings; and as baby grows older the
nurse-girl can amuse him during the long
hours; she can play on the floor with him, set
up and knock down continuous bricks for him,
and play with him just as skilfully as you can.
When baby is sick or hungry, then mother
is wanted, and nobody can take her place; but
when the little stomach is full to repletion,
when no pin obtrudes itself and aches are forgotten, then mother may well busy her adult
hands and brain with needful, thoughtful work,
and leave a nurse to care for baby-especially
if she herself is in the same room.
In looking at Europe through the goggles of 
Get Thee behind Mfe, Satan!
prejudice, American women have seen a great
many ugly things which are not visible to the
naked eye.
They have seen that European mothers are
heartless, frivolous, wicked-that they have no
serious conception of the importance of mother-hood, the duties of child-rearing, the blessed
privilege of devoting one's self entirely to Baby.
Now let us fly-only for a paragraph or
two-to France. Turning back a few pages of
life's book you may see her who now writes
these lines to you, standing at the bedside of a
young French wife. This. lady, during threequarters of a year has held herself as a special
agent of God, the object of His more than
common care, the medium through which His
greatest marvel is to be performed. Also, she
has held that medium sacred. She has lived
with special regard to the life which is to be.
Her  food has been chosen judiciously;  her
exercise has been out in the air.   She  has
bathed tri-weekly in luke-warm water, lying in
the healthfully relaxing bath a half an hour
each time. She has avoided all excitements,
all anger, all ill-temper, all feverish balls or
parties. But tranquil amusement has been
203 
204     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
constant; she must be diverted.  "It is important, because the child's mind is forming at
the same time as its body," says her husband.
"We desire our child to have a cheerful temperament."
It is finished! It is happily terminated!
cries out the cheery, valuable midwife. " It's
not more difficult than that.  Allons! courage,
little mama! Bon jour, mademoiselle!  How
dost thou  find thyself?  There's  thy  little
mama lying on that bed.  How dost thou find
her-to thy liking?  Come, little mother, it is
an admirable little daughter that the good God
has sent us. God be praised!"
Four days afterward the little mother tells me
she feels as if she'd like to scrub the floor.
Happily, she is not allowed. Old traditions
prevail even with the most sensible people.
Nine days must pass before she. leaves her
room; but she is sitting up and moving about
before that.
And the little daughter?-the beloved angel
of the good God?
Ah, she if you please is already forming her
opinion of her future place of residence. She 
Get Thee behind Mle, Satait!
is promenading up and down the Champs Ely'ses, or around the church of the Madeleine, or
sauntering the length of the Boulevards, when
she is three days old.
On a pillow. In the arms of a nurse. To be
sure.  But think of it! Three days old, and
cold weather! 
And every day, rain or shine, cold or warm,
this admirable little daughter disports herself in
the air almost the whole day long.  From her
birth she is outdoors. As she grows older she
runs, she jumps, she romps, she enjoys life to
the full.  And  spite of this early training I
never heard that the manners of a Frenchwoman
were lacking in elegance or even femininity.
"These are rich people's children.  How do
the poor do?"
They manage otherwise-but they manage.
That any child-of parents no matter how poor
-should remain cooped up within doors for
even one whole day would seem to the French
mind, something very like a catastrophe.
And you know how it is with the English.
If you do not, wait until you go to the beautiful
isle by the sea. There shall you see in the
public parks little girls and boys mounted on
205 
206    Get- Thee behind Me, Satan!
Shetland ponies about the size of Newfoundland dogs, galloping from one end of Rotten
Row to the other, pictures of health, beauty
and innocence.   There shall you see young
ladies rowing, swimming, following the hounds
mounted on mettlesome chargers, leaping fivebarred gates and taking ten-mile walks as a
daily constitutional. And the red cheeks, and
the hard, healthy flesh! How I long for these
for my countrywomen, North and South, East
and West! Can we not have them?  What's
to prevent?
"The red cheeks are an affair of climate."
It may be so; but the healthy body is not.
That is an affair of regular habits, of pure air,
of vigorous out-doot exercise. We can have
all these.
Let us have them. Women in the rural districts, get, each of you, a pair of strong boots
and make it a duty like any other to walk at
least two or three miles qvery day! Women of
the city, who can walk in any weather over
miles and miles of well-paved streets, let not
the fear of being seen in an old dress keep you
within, any day in the year. It is so easy to
explain it to any one of whose opinion you
. 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan'!
stand in awe. "I came out, bad as the weather
is, for my constitutional."   And not one but
will say "Sensible woman, to care for her
health."
And let these be laws which you yourself,
good mother, make for your girl children from
their earliest youth. Open their little minds to
the sweet knowledge that feet were made to
scamper with, arms were made to swing by,
mouths were made to breathe fresh air through,
nostrils to snuff it up with, ears are organs with
which to listen to song-birds, eyes are organs
with which to gaze upon the glory of God's
blue heaven, unobstructed by a window-pane.
XXII.
DID you ever know an expectant mother who
wanted a girl? No, I'll answer for it. Husband "wants a boy" and so does she.
Nevertheless, in this matter as in all others,
God disposes; and the nurse cries from behind
her cap-frill "Oh, sir, you've got such a dear
little daughter!"
A daughter! Why, he and wife had counted on
207
I 
208     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
a son; had even settled what they should name
him; nay, they had  gone further they had
c.alled him William after his rich uncle, who was
so delighted that he forthwith died and left the
child all his money. But a daughter!-oh! the
golden dream vanishes as abruptly as did that
of the farmer's daughter who had reckoned up
even to a husband out of the basket of eggs
she was carrying on her head, and broke them
all as she curtseying tossed her silly noddle to
decline a mythical rival.
A daughter! why they made sure it would be
a son! This aversion to a feminine baby would
indicate that we resemble the Chinese more
closely than we think.
However, missie is born. What are you going to do about it?  You can't send her back
where she came from.  One reason is that you
don't know where she came from.  At any rate,
she is here.   Trim her with laces, swathe her
in fine linen.   She isonly a little more helpless
now than she will be as a woman.
In the cradle there is no distinction of sex.
Tiny man will amuse himself with a string of
empty spools or an india-rubber doll as well as
missie; and spite of her pride in his sex mamma 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
will scarcely give her three-months-old boy gun,
pistol, or drum as he lies squirming in his crib.
For a period at least the sexes are equal; there
is no disadvantage in being a girl.
But speed me a year; and I will show you
already unmistakable signs of the manship of
master. His hair is parted to one side. He's
a boy. He's papa's MAN; he's mamma's BOY!
he's lord of all he surveys.
So anxious are his parents that the world
shall know that this bit of humanity is not that
inferior thing, a girl, but that he has undoubted
right to belong to the powerful tribe of'masculines, that, before he can do much more than
stagger (the full perfection of this he acquires
later in life), you shall hear the mother telling of
her plans for putting him in trousers.   "He's
such a boy," "he's a regular boy, you know;"
and a regular boy he remains to the proud
mother's heart until the time comes when that
heart is torn with the knowledge that he is an
irregular one.
In England an arbitrary decree of baby caps
says to the world,  "He  is the man!" for a
rosetted cap means boy baby, and a rosetteless
cap turns up its contemptuous frills at the girl.
209 
2IO    Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Do I accuse mothers of lack of love for their
girl-children?  God forbid.  And forbid it also
the gentle remembrance of my owfn dear mother
who tenderly reared and loved six daughters!
But  my accusation  is against the  foolish
distinctions made, in 5 thousand seemingly unimportant ways, between these two. creatures
whom God made with equal care, equal love;
to whom together he gave the world; to whom
together he has promised life everlasting.
"Why what can I do?" says a young
mother. " I don't make the difference between
my children. My boy is a real boy. He says
he wouldn't be a girlfor anything."
Who taught him to say such an absurd and
insolent thing? who encouraged him thus to
insult his mother?
Generally his mother-but  particularly his
father.
It is such good fun to cast slurs on the sex.
Is a boy of a quiet and retiring turn of mind?
Oh, shame him out of that-that's so like a girl!
Is he timid? Then be sure you avoid condemning timidity for itself, but only because it is a
distinguishing quality of a girl. Is he a crybaby? Then never trouble yourself to explain 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
that all cry-babies are nuisances, but say to him,
with disdainful lip and curling nostril, "Eh, a cry baby! Ain't you ashamed! Just like agirl!"
And father, mother and child give in chorus one
long sneer of contempt.
Nor does it in the least matter that your little
girl sitting there shall hear all this. 
Thus she early learns that mean and contemptible qualities are her birthwrong. Nor is
she ever encouraged to cast them aside as unworthy. She is a girl. They belong to her
sex.
I have known boy babies of whose acquaintance I was ashamed. They were so dastardly
that I have cut them in public. They were
mean, sneaking, snivelling, weak creatures; yet
by dint of earnest urging by loving mothers,
whose constant aim it,was to hold up to them
the high qualities which manhood required of
them, these boy creatures succeeded at last in
throwing aside many of the contemptible weaknesses which were evidently born in them and
ripened into strong, self-reliant, and worthy
men.
If I were permitted to make the laws of the
nursery, I would begin with this:
2II 
212      Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
Section I. In no boy-baby exchange shall
the stock of girl-babyhood be quoted below
par.
Section II.  Children shall only be guided
toward what is good, pure and true, not toward
what is becoming to their sex.  Cowardice,
weakness, lack of fortitude and all that is wicked
or weak is to be shunned because it is wicked
and weak, and not because it is girlish or
boyish.
XXIII.
I WONDER what makes baby cry so? A
pin?
But you cry pin, pin, and there is no pin.
All strings, sensible mother, or buttons, or,
better still, a few stitches done freshly every
morning.
"Then what makes baby cry? Ah, to be
sure-hungry!"
And nature's fount-or the apothecary's, the
bottle-is thrust in baby's mouth until she-fairly
spits it out.
Did it ever strike you that your baby is bored 
Get Thee behind Ale, Satan!  213
with your society? that she has had enough of
you, as you sometimes think you have had of
...~
her?
Then it is time to vary the monotony by introducing new elements.  Invite one of your
neighbor's babies in, and give the children their
first sociable by laying them down on the bed
or the floor together. My word for it, presently you will hear them crow and chirp, and you
will see them clap their chubby hands together,
and even make an effort to grasp each other's.
The observations of hundreds of -watchful eyes
will testify to the truth of this statement: that
the very youngest children often long for the
society of those of their own age, and nothing
less than that will make them happy.
Every nurse knows that it is far easier to take
care of two or even three children than one.
The reason is that a child alone is a tyrant; his
helplessness is his power; he rules all around
him with a rod of iron.   I have seen a woman
with accomplishments enough to charm a court
circle, at her wit's end to provide amusement
for her own baby.
But put another child along with this child;
then baby learns its first lesson of duty to 
214     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
society. He (or she) stands more in awe of
that other baby than he (or she) does of an
entire grown household.
"Stop making that noise, Willie," said
Clarisse to her boy aged three years; "we are
talking."
"Oo stop talking," was the answer.  "I must
make this noise."
He is ringing the dinner-bell at nine o'clock in
the morning.
And by what method of reasoning are you
to convince that boy that our talking (about
bonnets, I confess) is any more important than
his bell-ringing? Or that we have any right to
a monopoly of noises in the house, which so far
as he knows belongs entirely to him?   Clarisse
should early have explained this important point
to him. It would have been simple at the very
beginning. The trouble is that a young child
is humored so outrageously that he soon learns
to look upon his rights as paramount to all
others. No matter what fine new toy or book
is presented to any other child in the house, if
Baby cries for it he must have it.  "Do give it
to him, you selfish girl! Do give it to your
little baby brother."
lo 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Oh, the throngs of little martyrs all over the
world to tyrant baby!
I mind me of a household where a boy baby
deigned to make his appearance.   He was the
first-born; a little beauty, really, in other eyes
than those of his parents, and time has improved
his character until he is now as good as he is
good-looking.   But you never would  have
thought such a change could possibly come
about; for from the time he was one month old
until he passed his sixth year, I think he was as
bad a child as ever lived.
"I  must  be  amoosed,"  he  would  roar.
"Amoose me!" and he would jerk your book
out of your hand, and kick it about the floor.
"My dear, why don't you amuse that child?"
would cry the husband. "How any one can
sit quietly by reading when that child wants to
be amused is more than I can understand! Do
something to amuse him!"
"But, Fred, I am sewing on my new dress
now, which you want me to have done in time
to wear to church on Sunday."
" Put it away. Stay at home from church."
215 
2 I6    Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
"I want to be amoosed!" screamed the boy
by this time, indulging in a flood of tears "just
like a girl."
"Yes, darling; yes, swe-e-t!" cried wife,
husband and friend in chorus.
But how to accomplish this difficult task?
Master was fastidious.  No, he didn't want to
ride a jack-horse to Banbury Cross; no, he
wouldn't have the bear come and eat him (said
bear being his mother down on all fours, creeping up to him wagging her head and roaring
idiotically-and when she got close, having him
thrust his naughty little fist..in her face for
recompense); no, he didn't want his whip, nor
any of the expensive and ingenious toys which
had been bought, at any sacrifice, for him; no
ah yes —he would make a railroad train!
A railroad train consisted of every chair in
the house being fastened together with twine
and included the services of at least one adult
to sit motionless for hours and cry out "rtchew!
tchew! "-this passing muster as the voice of
the steam-engine.
But if visitors came and even one of those
chairs was wanted, what a yelling, shrieking, 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
altogether hideous scene that boy would make!
It was not only annoying, it was disgraceful.
One day when the washerwoman came with
her basketful of clean linen, a tablecloth was
found to be torn; and the woman said "I didn't
do it, the little boy must have done it."
He couldn't have been more offended if she
had called him a girl. He raged. And his
sensible parents laughed in admiration of this
sweet exhibition of his temper; and consoled
him for the indignity which had been (justly
enough, no doubt) put upon him by saying, in
that mellifluous and elevated language which
inane parents deem necessary to use when
speaking to their children:
"Did ze nasty wasserwoman say little boy
tory tablecloss? Oh, ze nassy, baddy wasserwoman! Little boy give it to her next time
she tums. Little boy knock her over ze head,
wissy broomstick."
He needed no second telling. For a week
he kept that idea in his mind.   When  the
laundress appeared he walked out deliberately
after the broomstick, and coming quietly in,
10
217 
218      Get Thzee behind 3Ie, Satan!
went up behind her and rapped her over the
pate such a blow that it was a mercy he didn't
break it.
Fancy the tableau! An inoffensive washerwoman    a good  washerwoman, of virtuous
morals and high clear-starching abilities-to be
broomsticked  on  sight by  your  first-born,
whom you have encouraged to the deed!
There were worse consequences than the two
weeks' soiled clothes lying around the house,
seeking whom they might be washed by. The
story seemed so humorous to the good parents
-who "never thought he would do such a
thing.! wasn't it too cunning? "-that by-and-by
the boy began to think that he had developed a
special talent in that line, and claiming the
broomstick as his property, rapped every one
in the house with it, until he felt encouraged to
try it on his father, who, never expecting this,
with masculine consistency, thrashed him.
What happened to ths little rogue to redeem
him?
A sister.
Yes, that sister happened and redeemed him.
I do not mean romantically, you understand. 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
At five or six years old a boy's romantic nature
is  not  largely  developed.    But  the  sister
belonged to the child-world, like himself, and
she showed him that though grown people had
no rights he was bound to respect, yet she and
other children had.
XXIV.
I SAID the other day to a friend who has a
darling and be-petted boy of three years old,
"How fortunate it is that that child does not
pass at one step from this period of being
humored in every fancy, of being encouraged in
every whim, to that desperate battle of life
awaiting him when he must fight for his bread,
for his good name, for his position, for his
religion."
Yes," she said.  "And it is difficult for me
to realize that he will ever be a man. You
know to us he seems so truly like an angel that
I sometimes tremble for fear God will suddenly
claim him; but if he lives, year by year he will
lose his babyish sweetness, grow less interest
2i9
I
s 
220     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
ing, have a will of his own, be naughty perhaps
and we shall be obliged to punish him; then he
will go to school, become absorbed in his studies, little by little detaching himself from usand then! there he is a man and we are no longer
those powerful lawgivers'father' and'mother;' we are simply the' old folks.'"
Lawgivers!  Ay,  that's the word!  The
general run of parents seem to know only two
states of existence: the first, when they are
simply baby worshippers; the second, when
they expect their children to become abject
slaves of them, the parents.
How easy it is to tell what state of feeling
exists in  a household between parents  and
children, only by observing how the latter act
when the former are present! Could anything
be.more depressing than to be an inmate of a
home where the children are afraid to speak
above a whisper when " father is in the room"
-where "father's coming! " is the signal for
as general a scattering, a rushing "to arms" of
good behavior as the terrible cry "the
enemy!" is to an army which fancied itself
secure. 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan! 
In such a household as this I scarcely know
which to pity most-the parents who lose the
delicious enjoyment of intercourse with young
minds so much fresher and purer than their
own-or the children whose recollection of their
parents, instead of being in after years a source
of blissful delight, is to be clouded by a dark
vision of two grown-up tyrants, whose comfort
and quietude were purchased at the cost of
every innocent amusement of children.
None of our circle is happier in sitting about
the Table than our boy Algie.  He feels that
his individuality is just as much respected there
as it would be if he were fifty years old instead
of fifteen. We try to avoid all show of authority with him as much as possible. We try to
cultivate in him a spirit of manly self-respect,
which will make him fear to do an unmanly
thing, for his own sake. We would no more
snub him than we would snub Rebecca.
You may see evidences in this small man of a
rare sense of honor, and of appreciation of his
place in our life-not as a serf, nor as a creature
to be curbed, nor one to be put under restraint
because of his youth-but as a companion and
221 
222     Get Thee behind' Me, Satan!
friend, a person to whom we look for comfort,
cheer, and good-fellowship.
Perhaps an incident will illustrate Algie's
character in this regard:
One day last winter he remembered that he
had his father's promise that he might go skating. It was Saturday and he was ftome from
school.   I suppose the little gentleman had
thought about it all the week; he is a beautiful
skater and the Rink on Saturdays is crowded
with children, and Algie's fancy skating is
always admired. Why, once when he was cutting initials and making roses and doing all
sorts of "big things on ice," a lot of elegant
people, girls, boys, and grown folks, clustered
around and looked at him, and when he
finished they all clapped their hands and cried
bravo! in a way that would have pleased
an opera singer.  So you may easily understand that he looked forward eagerly to Saturday and skating. He "had been watching the
weather all the time, and hoping it wouldn't
thaw.
But lo and behold! when Saturday came and
he put on his overcoat and took his skates in 
Get Thzee behind Jte, Satan!
one hand and his cap in the other and went up
to his father and said:
"Well, papa, I suppose I may go skating
now, mayn't I?  You promised me  I might,
you know."
Oh dear, here, was a bad job! His papa was
overwhelmed with work, wanted him very nruch
indeed. He was up to his eyes in a sort of
work which Algie was very handy at, and had
been counting on this Saturday when he should
have his boy's help. A shade of disappointment crept over his face, which Algie noted
anxiously.
But our man is as honorable as our boy.
If I promised you, Algie, that's the end of
it. I wanted you so very much this afternoon!
All right. You can go."
Algie went.
Where? why, to the cupboard and hung up
his overcoat and cap, and put away his skates,
and then came back with his- sweet face bright
as sunshine, and laying his arm around his
father's shoulder affectionately, he said:
"What kvas it you wanted me to do, papa?"
223 
224     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
It cost the boy a mighty effort to do this,
and it was a nobler act than it may seem, here
on my page. For Algie knew perfectly well
that he was under no sort of compulsion-it was
his right to go skating, and he knew that his
rights were sacred in that house. But, much as
he loved his favorite pastime, he loved'the happiness of that home more, and he could not
do anything to mar it.
Algie, if he were allowed, would ask nothing
better than to be permitted constantly to furnish amusement for the whole household. He
contributes his share to the attractions of our
home, and enters into the question of the hanging of a new picture, or the training of a freshlyacquired flower, or the arrangement of a newlyfurnished chamber, with as much gusto as any
of us.  The other day he brought us in such apretty thing-a bottle, all covered and running
over with a thick growth of beautiful living
green. Oh, so pretty! What an ornament it
is to our Table!
He found out the secret of making this from
another boy; and then he took the first thing
that came to hand-a cracked bottle which 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
he saw was of a graceful shape, with fat body
and slender neck; and he got his Aunt Rebecca
to sew two or three layers of flannel all over it
and tightly fitting its form. Then he took a
few cents' worth of curling cress seed and
soaked it over night; next morning he spread
the sticky seed all over the wet bottle-planted
it, you might say, in the flannel.   Then he
stood the bottle in a saucer full of water and
placed it in the sunishine; and every day as
frequently as he found time he basted the bottle
with water in a spoon-just as Norah does the
roast, with the gravy. And the seed sprouted
and covered the whole bottle with its brights
luxuriance, and gave us for our dear Table,
from our dear boy, a thing of beauty and a joy
for several weeks-during which time everybody in the house is trying the experiment, and
we shall soon have more than we know what to
do with.
10*
225 
226     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
XXV.
I SHOULD very much like to see forever
abolished the absurd notion that athletic sports
should be confined to boys.   If a girl feels a
desire to climb fences, let her climb; if she
wants to play marbles or toss jackstones, let
her do these "unfeminine" things.  But why
unfeminine? Have marbles or jackstones any
sex?
On the other hand, if a boy feels like learning
to crochet or do worsted-work, let not these
tastes be interfered with.
You smile at the idea of any healthy, hearty,
wide-awake boy wanting to work in worsted!
But you don't smile at the idea of a healthy,
wide-awake girl doing it.   On the contrary,
' that's her sphere.
Chinese ruts, I tell you! It is no more absurd for a boy to embroider on Penelope canvas
than it is for a man to measure calico and
ribbons.
Two of the choicest gifts I had last Christmas
were bookmarks of Bristol-board elaborately 
-Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
embroidered in split zephyr. Both were done
by splendid boy friends of mine, one seven
years old, the other thirteen. Their mothers
are sensible women, not governed by arbitrary
notions of the sexuality of employments.
And the boys don't care a farthing about
great social questions, but say that it's rear fun
of a rainy day to sit down and work bookmarks.
At the same time, if a boy would rather dig
in the dirt than amuse himself with brighthued wool, I would let him, with all my heart.
And I would let a girl have the same privilege.
The cry which greets the girl as soon as she
is able to comprehend anything more difficult of
comprehension than pap and a perambulator is
this: Be a Lady!
Liberally translated this means, Be a colorless, lifeless, aimless dough doll; be a spiritless,
cowardly feminine machine' an ignoble, narrow-minded breathing apparatus.
What is it to be a lady? Or rather what
should it be?
It should be to be stronger, nobler, more self
227 
228     Get Thee behind Me, Satan I
reliant than the common run; better educated,
bigger hearted, larger brained; with mind to
conceive, hands to execute.
And how can any girl obtain that first desideratum for ladyhood, health, if outdoor exercises are     denied her?
"Oh, I don't want my girl to be a romp,"
says Mamma; "she gets exercise enough. She
is taking Calisthenic lessons."
A government is best governed which is least
governed. Exercise is healthiest which is not
taught.
I joined a Calisthenic class once.  It was for
ladies and children; the two helpless classesles Imbeciles!
The Bloomer costume was recommended to
us, but it was not indispensable. Consequently
it was a motley group which assembled twice a
week-in a large bare hall, where an out-of-tune
piano showed its attenuated legs-so thin as
to suggest that it needed Calisthenic exercise or something else to put vigor in them.
The  piano jingled-ti tum ti turn-under the
emaciated fingers of a pale and worn woman;  and les Imbeciles went and took their 
Get fTlee behind Me, Satan!
places like four-and-twenty blackbirds all in a
row.
Provided with wooden dumb-bells about as
heavy as gourds, these poor seekers for health
and strength lifted their weak arms up and
down-up and down-in  time to the music.
They stepped backward, they stepped forward;
to the right, to the left; keeping their anxious
eyes on the lady who stood in front of them to
see that they did as she did.
"March!" cries the teacher; and they pro
ceed to march. They tread on each other's
heels; they turn the wrong way; they close up
and squeeze the smaller children till the smaller
children squeal and struggle to save themselves
from being smothered; some few drop their
dumb-bells on their neighbors' indignant toes;
about half the marchers give up and retreat to
benches; and oftener than not the whole class
breaks up in disorder.
An awkward squad, you' say?  Yes, and an
unhappy squad, too-doing all these against
their natural inclinations-and as a poor substitute for the exercise which common sense ought
to have dictated from their earliest years.
229 
230     Get Thee behinid Me, Satad!
And half the time ruddy-cheeked boys with
hot health exuding from every pore would
pause in their outdoor game of bat and ball,
come and gaze in at the hermetically-sealed
windows where we were playing these awkward
pranks, and laugh at us.
A half-hour's romping in the open air is worth
more than all the calisthenics in the books, to a
girl with any life at all in her.
Nevertheless I earnestly recommend calisthenics (as better than no exercise at all) for those
poor skeletons of sickly women whose constitutions are ruined, whose backs are in a chronic
state of aching as miserably as if they'd been
hoeing a potato field, who feel a never-ending
"bearing down," and are finally borne downand then, please God, borne up!
A sickly woman may perhaps be a healthy
angel; for that let us ever pray.
I 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan.t
XXVI.
WELL, my lady is home from school. She
has left girlhood behind her. What has she got
in exchange?   You have spent hundreds'of
dollars on her, fretted about her, deprived yourself of her society, and what return does she
make for all this?  Put your affection aside,
weigh her in the balance of true womanhood,
what is her worth?
Is she strong?-strong in body, mind, heart,
soul? Or is she a complaining creature with a
white face, who has to lie down for half a day
every time she takes an hour's walk; her character as colorless as her cheeks; her education
superficial to the last degree; forgetting already
the very things she had at the tip of her tongue
last week; unable to play the simplest piece on
the piano "without her noted;" her mind as
unformed as when she was a dozen years old;
her past a record of woman-teasing; her future
an expectant record of man-teasing. No high
ambitions, no set career, no bright hopes, noth
23I 
232     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
ing to look forward to but a round of eating,
drinking, sleeping, shopping, flirting and a hus band.
Mrs. Peruser, do not get angry at your
daughter if haply you should find her made on
this pattern. It is more your fault than hers.
Why, with splendid material, did you cut this
creature so narrow, shorten the front breadths
of her soul, hump up into an enormous pannier
the gross organs of her self-conceit, her vanity,
her love of wealth? No wonder she is the
deformity she is.
I read the other day an interesting recital by
a lady who had travelled extensively in China.
We are wont to look upon the condition of
women in that country as something too pitiable; yet this lady gave it as her frank opinion
that the same general code of laws for women
prevailed there as here. Women are kept helpless and pretty because it pleases men; poor
parents make agonizing and humiliating sacrifices in order to make their daughters "smallfeet" women,  because that is an attractive
feature to men-even as poor parents here
struggle to give their daughters fine clothes, 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
have them taught attractive accomplishments,
for* the obvious-often confessed-purpose of
catching a husband.
Come now, mother and father, why not leave
this husband out of the question-as completely
as you leave the wife out of the question in
your boy's case? Suppose your girl has a taste
for literature: why not foster that taste? Why
not in all your conversation with her let her
see that your mind is full of her future great
career?  Why not speak of it thus: "We  expect you to be a great authoress, my dear.
Give your whole mind to it. We will set you
on the road to fame and fortune as fairly as
we can. We believe in your talent-and we
believe the world too will one day believe
in it."
I take literature as an illustration merely
because it is handy; the literary road is wider
for woman now than it once was; the entrance
to it is easier; so easy, in Tfact, that there is
now some jostling among the eager. But, suppose your daughter has other tastes-no more
strange now than literature once was-suppose
she wishes to be a great traveller. Shall you
233 
234      Get Thee behind Me, Sata!n!
crush this wish out of her breast, clip her
wings, spend the  money  which would   lve
gratified her desire on flaunting finery and say,
"Sit down now, and suck your thumbs in the
approved womanly manner until you catch a
husband?"
Do you ask, How can a woman trasvel alone'?
That is mere stay-at-home ignorance.  Thousands of women cross the ocean alone, yearly.
Madame  Ida Pfeiffer went twice around  the
world alone, penetrating into the interior of
Africa and of Asia among savage tribes. The
lady to whom I referred just now went to China
and back alone. Other women, too, have made
the circuit of the globe, travelling without male
escort.  You  may  have  noticed  that  bright
rosy-cheeked girl who walks daily with brisk
footsteps in Central Park-sometimes in the
morning, sometimes in the afternoon, but
daily in all weathers.   That  girl has  been
all alone to India.   Some  wiseacres  remonstrated with the friends with whom she lives
(she is an orphan) on the impropriety of so
pretty a girl walking in a public place like the
Central Park unattended by cavalier, matron or 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
servant. They thought it right to be suggested
to her that she should have some escort.
"What  an insult so paltry  a suggestion
would be," was the sensible reply, "to a splendid girl who  has had sufficient courage and
self-reliance to make the voyage to India
alone!
Suppose your daughter should desire to keep
a store?  Why not set her up in one?  Can't
afford it?  You  afford it for your son.   It
would wound your pride.?  Ah, there's the
wretched old pinching shoe! How I abominate it!
Why can't you be brave, be advanced, conquer this old-time habit of petty thought, show
your neighbors how much more progressive
and large-minded you are than they? Instead
of being ashamed of it, be proud of it.  Have
her name painted on a signboard in letters a foot
high, and let everybody see that you rejoice in
your daughter's wide-awake, nineteenth-century
spirit.
And then see, too, how changed would be
the demeanor of the young men of her acquaintance-those self-glorifying individuals who
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236    Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
think every woman who looks at them once is
in love with them; veritable sultans who
imagine they have only to fling down their
handkerchiefs, and every girl in the town will
scramble for the honor of picking it up. Every
community is full of these noble types of adolescent manhood. I know certainly a million
specimens "of my  own knowledge."  Their
governing idea is that most girls are fools and
ninnies-fit for nothing but playthings; and
when they meet one who is not of this character,
one with whom they cannot play the fool, then
they dub her strong-minded, a horrible newfangled-idead creature, masculine, and what not.
But they respect her!
Believe me, good parent, that the knowledge
that she is of some importance in the world, is
going to have a career, to make her mark, will
fill your daughter with renewed energy; it will
take that pain out of her back like magic; put
fire in her eyes; color tn her cheeks.
I have known what it is to be an enforced
dawdler around the house, without any outlet
for what energy and ability I possessed; eating
the bread of idleness and dependence, sleeping 
Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
the sleep of the sluggard, living the life of the
do-nothing, yawning, listless ennuyee. And I
have known what it is to have an OBJECT put
in my life, sending the blood coursing like a
torrent through my veins, arousing my best
energies and my earnest determination to show
those who loved me what I could do-and what
I did. I had as many back-aches as your
daughter, Mrs. Peruser, in the old times. I'm
better now, thank you.
It may strike you that not all women would
say Amen! to the voice that announced to them
that there was a career open to them in which
they might go battle and struggle as their
brothers do for a livelihood. And in conceding
that this is the case I cannot refrain from asking
whose fault it is? Is it the fault of this human
creature whom God has endowed with brains
and heart the same as her brothers? Can you
conceive that if this girl of twenty had been
reared in a society where abslutely no prejudicial pressure was brought to bear to bias her
judgment and influence her verdict she would
elect to live an aimless life, to die after years of
idleness leaving no more mark of her having
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238     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
lived than the sparrows do when they fall?
warrant me, no; there is no greater love
idleness, no more leaning toward nonentity,
my sex than there is in yours, dear sir.
XXVII.
THE French system of business partnerships
between husband and wife is an excellent one
on many accounts. Girls are encouraged, in
their efforts to make themselves a career, by
the knowledge that they are not interfering
with their chances for making a happy marriage
by so doing. Quite the reverse.
And I admit-and nowhere in this book will
you find anything looking to a different opinion
-that a happy marriage is a thing to which all
good girls everywhere do and always will look
forward hopefully, as to a bright spot in the
future.
All I have said about leaving girls free to
choose their career as boys are left free-about
teaching girls to earn their own livelihood as
boys are taught-about encouraging girls to the
I
of
in 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
idea of independence as a boy is encouragedwill be sharply misconstrued by my reader if he
does not see that my aim is, after all, to glorify
MARRIAGE.
I would rob marriage of the curses which
cling to it, like barnacles to a noble ship.
I would lift marriage out of the mire ofthe
market-place, where now women scramble for
it with unseemly and indecent haste.
I would hedge it about with more difficulties
at the outset, so as to prevent the happening of
that fatal malady, whose cure is sought in the
keen knife of divorce.
I would make marriage the earthly symbol of
Heaven, as it was when God ordained it.
But, while I admire the French for many
sensible customs, their custom as regards courtship between young people is not one of those
I applaud.
I remember my astonishment at a little incident which passed under my eyes, some years
ago in Paris. An American lady friend of mine
was to give a grand dinner on the occasion of
her birthday. Some of her French acquaintances were invited.
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240    Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
One afternoon when I was calling on my
friend, the name of a French Countess was
announced.   After salutations she said, "I
came here to-day principally to ask you a
question-is the young Baron de Luynes to be
at your dinner?"
"Yes," answered the American lady.
"Then," said the Countess, "you must not
feel hurt if I do not bring my daughter Victorine."
"Why, Madame la Comtesse," said the
American lady, "Monsieur de Luynes is a
charming young man."
"True, true! A very charming young man
-far too charming to throw any young girl in
contact with. He is poor and in the army. I
wish my daughter to marry a man of equal
fortune with herself, and one who is not a
soldier."
When the Countess took her leave I said to
my friend, "Do you not think she was looking
rather too far ahead? There is a good wide
difference between meeting a gentleman at a
dinner party and marrying him."
"That is the way with the French," she 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
answered; "they never expose their children to
the temptation of falling in love with a person
whom they might not marry."
Another time I saw this feeling exemplified
the other way-by a man refusing to place
himself in a similar  position.   An  eldqrly
French lady of my acquaintance had a gentleman friend who wanted to marry. He had a
small income-just enough to support himself
and he desired to find a wife with at least the
same income.   A  -lady with whom  I was
also acquainted-and it is rather amusing to
know that she was an American lady-intimated to the French lady that she would like
to  meet  the  gentleman.    Her income was
nothing like what he required, but she thought
if he saw her he would be so pleased with her
that he would overlook that.  (You know what
a mania there is among American women
abroad to marry Frenchmen of quality.) But
he declined positively to meet her. All the
representations concerning her being a delightful person only made him more firm in his resolve. If she was indeed so charming, he explained to his elderly friend, he should certainly
11
24I
*. e   I,            
242    Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
become enamored of her; and that would be a
fatal mistake.   The woman he should marry
must have a certain income.   Otherwise he
could not marry.  He would not marry even
such a woman if she did not please him; but
the income must be there in the first place.
Then  they'd see  about pleasing each other
afterwards.
A French engaged couple are never allowed
to be one instant alone together before marriage.   The low standard -of morality among
men, and the entire absence of knowledge of
the world in which girls are kept, make French
parents feel this to be necessary.   I suppose
they do for the best according to the circumstances which surround them; but this is a poor
way for young people to find out anything
about each other's character. I am so far from
advocating this policy for American girls, that
I think a young girl and a young man, even
without being engagec, should be allowed at
least little snatches of conversation entirely'undisturbed by the presence of another party.
What is the use of inviting a young  man  to
come  and caiL on your dlaughter, and then
I'-vt   
Get Thee behind He, Satanz!
making your daughter sit off in a corner mumchance while you-old father, or prim mothermonopolize all the conversation with th; young
man yourself?   He  didn't come here to pay
his addresses to you; and it may happen to you
to wake up to the knowledge that the young
man finds it dull calling at your house, and
being obliged to entertain old folks instead of
doing some honest courting to your daughter;
and he perhaps comes to the conclusion that
your daughter isn't half so clever or so lively
as your neighbor's daughter, who is allowed to
see him for half an hour alone before the old
folks come down, and perhaps a little five
minutes in the entry-way at parting.
XXVIII.
IF ever a duty was clearly marked out for a
parent it is this: to see to it that his pure daughter shall be mated to no impure man.   And it is
rather late in the day to set about testing the
condition of his morals when a young man has
been visiting at your house for months, and
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244     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
your daughter is hopelessly infatuated with him.
It is because the stern parent has developed his
sternness so stupidly and neglectfully late in the
day, that we so often find children and parents
in conflicting attitudes, and grievous wrong
resulting for both.
I do not believe there is a father walking this
earth who desires other than her own happiness
for his daughter; but fathers are so often too
careless or too busy to note what acquaintances
their daughters make! And so they jog along
with eyes blinded to danger until they find
enthroned a power of authority in the shape ot
a young man who three months ago was a
stranger to them all, but who now wields an
influence stronger than the parents' own.
I knew a girl who married a drunkard-oh,
but one of those beastly drunkards who drop
into gutters and are dragged home at night by
indignant but sympathizing friends, or who lie
down on dramshop -o'unges and sleep until
they are pitched out doors by the proprietors.
All this at night, you understand. In the daytime he was bright enough, and very fascinating
in his ways.   He began visiting at the girl's 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan! /
father's house along with a lot of other young
mnen, and her father neither thought nor said nor
knew much about him. Suddenly came the
astounding announcement to the father that his
daughter wished to marry this young manwould marry him-or die in the attempt. Then
this tardy father set to work to learn something
about the character of the young man who
wished to take from him the young soul who
during long years-all the years of her lifehad been so tenderly reared, so earnestly
prayed for, so nearly idolized; and then he
found out that this proposed husband into
whose care he was asked to surrender his pure
treasure, was the beastly drunkard I have
shown. And what do you suppose happened
when he told her? Why, she called him a
liar! Yes, her grayhaired father, whose authority she had never before disputed, whose love
for her she had never before dreamed of doubting-she turned upon him with flashing eyes
and bitter taunts, and said,he was a liar, and
that he wished to break her heart. And less
than a week after, she had eloped with the man
who encouraged her to believe that her father
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246     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
was a liar, and swore to her that he had never
touched a drop of ardent spirits in his life. The
very night of their marriage he reeled into the
room of the hotel where they were stopping —
and in which they had been married about
three hours before-so drunk that he had forgotten everything that had happened, and was
perfectly astounded to find her in his bedroom;
and even turned upon her in his drunken rage
and called her an immodest girl, and bade her
go home to her father.
She went-you may imagine how heartbroken. Her father's arms were open.
"But  my darling," he  said, "I told you
this."
"Yes, dear father, I know you did," she said,
sobbing and hiding her head on his breast, "but
I loved him and I could not believe it. Oh,
why didn't you find out something about him
before he had robbed me of my heart!"
Herein you will perhaps see illustrated what
virtue there is in the French plan which allows
no acquaintanceship between ineligible young
people.
Any gentleman who habitually visits a young 
Gat Thzee behind M,e, Satan!
lady ought to be so perfectly well known to the
family of that young lady that if he should pro
pose to-morrow, the only question need be,
"Do you love each other sufficiently?"  Everything else ought to have been understood as
satisfactory long ago; and if all was not satisfactory, no acquaintanceship should have been
allowed.
"Victorine may not see Monsieur de Luynes
at your dinner table," said Madame la Comtesse,
"because he is not eligible as a husband.   He
is charming, and she is young.   Dangerous attributes! No, no!  She must find her lover
and husband among the eligible acquaintances
by whom I shall surround her."
Eligibility may mean with the Countess money
and position simply; with us it can be made to
mean good character, pure morals, religious
excellence. Surround your daughter with these,
and let her make her heart-thoice from among
a group of men so excellent that love alone shall
settle the question as to which of her admirers
she will marry.
Then, with God's blessing on them, let them
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248     Get Thee behind Me, Satan-!
freely exchange their tender ideas and heartlongings undisturbed.  You needn't sit like a
cat watching a mouse-or two mice. You have
reared your daughter with laxity indeed if you
cannot trust to her self-protecting sense of honor
now. You must have small faith in the man to
whom you are willing to intrust this precious
soul which God put into your hands to care for,
if you have not also confidence in him.   Let
him pay his addresses to her undisturbed; let
him say the sweet little foolish things which stir
her heart so deeply, but which might stir your
risibles; let him sing his love-songs to her and
request her to meet him by moonlight alone
(alone, you observe!) with such expression as
love gives the human voice, without your standing by in grim judgment on his performances,
as if he were an opera-singer, and had charged
you something for listening to him.
Those blissful hours of courtship! Are they
ever forgotten?-the hand-pressure at the gate;
the strolls under the elm-trees; the snatched
kiss under the umbrella on that terrible rainy
night, you know. Gracious! Don't I pity the
married couple who can't look back on such 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
sweet, fond, foolish pictures as this, in memory's
magic picture-book!
Husband, where is that poem about "Making
Memories," which you wrote when we were at
the seaside that'summer?
Ah, here it is:
MAKING MEMORIES.
Making beautiful memories
To sweeten our lives in another day;
To be remembered in the years
Waiting for us in the far away.
Leafy groves, where long, cool shades
Woo unto rambling hour on hour;
To be remembered like a dream Leaf and bird and grass-and flower.
Under the white moonlight last night
Where we whispered, hand in hand,
Looking out from the pillar's shade
Over the beach with its white, white sand
There was a picture! The far-off stars,
The near-by daisies, the sighlng sea;
The good-night pressure of hands; the words
That fluttered down from your window to me.
The commonest thing of our to-day
Will sometime b-. a poem, a dream;
11*
249 
250     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Bathed in the light of the far away,
How fair, how fair, these hours will seem!
Much of this is for memories Much perhaps will he forgot;
But the word that told me you loved me, love,
Oh, that will not! oh, that will not!
"A thing of that sort is rather pltasanter to
remember than it was to experience," says husband, lighting a cigar; "and it wasn't unpleasant to experience, either."
I am-acquainted with a couple in the South
who  have  been married twenty-one  years!
Twenty-one years! What changes have happened since these two were romantic lovers and
were enjoying their blissful courtship!  Nine
beings-nine human  souls —have entered their
world and their love since then. And their love
has grown like compound interest, for each of
these nine is loved as much' as the originals
themselves, and the originals love each other
nine or ninety times mere than then.
I visited them recently in their southern
home.   Though it was early spring by the
calendar, the warmth of summer had already
reached their climate; and it was pleasant to 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
sit in their pretty though- plain parlor, with
the windows open, and the odor of Southblooming flowers scenting the air.  Soon the
moon arose with that mellow radiance, that
rich golden hue peculiar to the South, and
the husband stepped out on the balcony. All
was still. He leaned through the window
and said softly, "Dora, come out and look at
the moonlight."
Then it was a sight to see that serene and
stout mother of nine children and one at the
breast-(he was there at the precise moment I
am speaking of, too)-hurry out with all the
romance of a girl of sixteen to look at the
moonlight.   He put his arm about her thick
waist.  "Just twenty-one years ago to-night,"
he said, "we were married."
The stillness was kept so sacred and profound
by those within the room, that we could hear
the unromantic  little rogue-number ninevoicing his content with murmurous lips, as the
three stood there where the moonlight shed its
rich beams upon them'.
It was just such a night as this," said she,
"that we roamed about Niagara, where we
25I 
252     Get T2ce behind fIe, Satan!
went on our wedding tour. Oh, wasn't that a
blissful time?"
"Not more so than this," he answered, and
kissed her as tenderly as he did then, I'll be
bound.
Ah, how we admired that romantic couple of
forty-five or so, as we sat within and listened.!
Surely, surely, there is nothing on earth so
beautiful as wedded love.
My friends' house was burned during the
war- all the loved accumulations of years destroyed in an hour by a victorious general's
torch. That was hard, wasn't it? I think so.
We mingle our tears, talking of the war. We
were on different sides, you know-but what
of that? What is a political issue-what are
fifty political issues-compared to a tried and
true friendship of long years' duration? - at
least when the political issue is dead, and the
friendship lives.   "If secession was  a sin,"
they say, "we have dearly paid for it."  And
they have. If all sins were so terribly avenged,
we should all of us perhaps be more virtuousor less. Meantime they are now, as they were
before the war, our  brothers;  our dashing, 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
handsome, generous, warm-hearted Southern
brothers; and the girls are our lovely, darkeyed, romantic Southern sisters, who used to
be the heroines of the novels for their beauty's
sake, and the men the heroes for their impetuous sense of honor, their rash bravery, their
open-handed generosity. 
Shame upon those writers North and South
who have so distorted character with their
venomous pens that the worst, the lowest, the
meanest, the most exaggerated type of each
section is paraded before the other as a sample
of the whole! By these writers of the South,
the Freelove woman of New York is held up as
the type of Northern womanhood-by these
writers of the North, the brutal Legree and the
degraded "low-downer" are held up as types
of Southern gentlemen.  Southern gentlemen!
Why,  this Philip-this man  who  has  been
married twenty-one years, and of whom I have
been speaking-he is a Sputhern gentleman.
Find me a grander!
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254     Get Thee behind Me, Satan /
XXIX.
I PITY the young man who has to pay his
addresses at a house where there are several
sisters. He stands such a strong chance of
being unmercifully ridiculed by the sisters he is
not in love with. They, being only lookers-on,
-can calmly criticise everything about him.
The merry rogues burst with laughter at every
sign of his lovesickness, and lie awake giggling
after they. have gone to bed, at the remembrance of the sigh he heaved when he was
leaving, and how funny he looked when he cast
up his eyes in his love-throes.
Then of course the sister whom he fancies,
wishes to know what "the girls" think of him;
and without the slightest malice the fun-loving
monkeys  pronounce  him  "Pretty nice, but
rather countrified," an4 tell Lillie when she
marries him she really must not let him sing his
hymns through his nose. And there! The first
you know, ridicule from those absurd little girlcritics, her sisters, has killed the incipient fond 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
ness that was in Lillie's breast, and the poorfellow gets the mitten.
Don't do it, girls! If Sister has a beauti, retire
discreetly to the background; don't hear nor see
what he says and does. Many things in him that
seem very absurd to you are very sweet in her
eyes; and would remain so if you didn't bring
to bear the weight of your trifling judgment on
it, and so change admiration into a sense of her
beau's being a laughing-stock-which no girl
can stand.
Just think how you would feel, Miss Laughing-Eyes, if Charley Goodboy were to bring his
brothers with him when he comes to pay his addresses to you, and you were forced to play the
agreeable while you knew your every action was
under sharp criticism-and the criticism of ridicule-from the young gentlemen. But the
parallel to this has more than once come to my
knowledge.
I knew a household where there were four
sisters-four sweet, happy, pretty, healthy girls.
They were extremely attached to each other,
this Fanny, Libbie, Ursula (alias Puss) and
Mamie. I suppose they never had in all their
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256     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
lives a secret from each other, and each thought
that the three others were the three most
splendid girls that ever trod the earth.
There wasn't one atom of selfishness in these
girls. They were rather a large party, you see,
and it wasn't always convenient to take all of
them out pleasuring at once; for irnstance, in
any ordinary carriage, the four girls filled it, and
there wasn't room for anybody else; so their
all going at once wasn't to be thought of; and
then came the scramble as to who should go.
Each became stricken with the determination to
stay at home, so that the others might have the
enjoyment.
"Now Mamie, you shall go!  You didn't go
last time-go, darling!"
"No,  deary-you go;  I'd rather you and
Puss should go. It'll do you good."
"Well, I won't go, that's flat!  Fannie needs
a drive more than I do."
So these dear little self-abnegating darlings
would go on until you became almost as exasperated as if they were disputing selfishly instead of generously.   One  day  last winter
their father, who writes for the papers, got two 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
tickets for Nilsson sent him, and he could only
take  one  of the girls.  Goodness  gracious!
What a maddening, self-sacrificing time they
did have about that! Their father got angry at
last, and said He'd be hanged if any of them
should go; he'd burn the ticket up, or take
Aunt Polly, who is as deaf as a post, and nearly
blind into the bargain.
It's just the same way about the girls' clothing. If one gets something new, the first thing
she does is to go steal her arm around the waist
or neck of one of her sisters, and try to relinquish the new finery. Anything really fresh
and pretty goes a begging, for all are too unselfish to appropriate it. After it's faded perhaps they come to an understanding, and agree
to wear it by turns. Thus sashes, neck-ribbons,
collars, slippers, rings, brooches and sleevebuttons belong to this commonwealth of four
members.
They have solved many T Utopian scheme;
their very wardrobe is cooperative. Eight willing hands accomplish household labors in a
jiffy. They draw lots for the sweeping, and the
one who gets it is triumphant, and the three
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253     Get T/,ee be,ziizd Me, Satan!
others fret because they fear it is too hard for
her. Finally I may'say that you can't please
Fannie half so much any other way as you can
by "raving" over the accomplishments of Libbie, Puss, and Mamie; and to gain the hearts
of Mamie, Puss, and Libbie you have only to
sing the praises of their sister Fan.
Of course they have long ago settled what
sort of man they are going to marry.  This
would be all very well except that the kind of
man they have fixed on don't exist.  This, you
will confess, is a drawback; but if their beau
ideal did exist, I pity the poor fellow if he
should come along and there should be only
one of him! What a scrambling there would
be on the part of the four self-sacrificers to present him each to the other! He'd have to submit to a worse fate than Solomon's baby.  (On
second thought it was not Solomon's baby, but
only a.baby he threatened to halve.)
The kind of man thefour girls. had settled to
marry (a long time before Bob Stevens fell in
love with Fan) was just twenty-one and a half
years old; six feet high; so straight he leaned
the other way; fall in his back; small feet done 
Get Thiee behind Me, Satan!
up in tight patent-leather boots; complexion of
marble whiteness; nose straight on a line with
his forehead, like the nose of a Grecian statue;
deep, large, blue eyes; black hair curling all
over his head; long, silky, black moustache,
excruciatingly waxed at the ends; ruby-red
lips, and teeth as regular as the false sets in'the
dentist's show-case. His conversation was to
be one stream of poetical quotation; and he
was to bow half-way to the ground every time
he encountered the sisters, without in the least
disturbing the fall of his trouser-leg over his
instep. He was to be a poet, a scholar, and a
philosopher; he was to sing like Mario and
waltz like Taglioni; and rich-oh, the Count of
Monte Cristo or old Crcesus himself shouldn't
be richer!
And that isn't half.
Meantime, here was plain Robert Stevens
desperately in love with Fan!
Poor Bob! He couldn't keep away. Every
evening during the soft summer when his fondness for Fan first developed itself, he would
walk timidly up to the girls' doorstep after
supper, and face the whole four of them, and
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260     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
say, "Good evening, Miss Fannie. Hope I see
you well."
How that Puss and Mamie did have this
phrase over and over! Little rascals, they slept
two in a bed and all four in one large room,
and before Fan got her eyes open in the morning they would hop out in their night-clothes,
and go and half smother her with kisses and
shout in her ear "Good morning, Miss Fannie.
Hope I see you well."
"Oh, don't tease me so, girls, don't!" poor
Fan would say; "I don't care for him-I don't
indeed."
Meantime every day Fannie was feeling the
influence of a sweet and strong nature which
was pouring out its wealth of adoration at her
feet. How she wished the girls would think
him "nice!"  How  she would have enjoyed
loving him if those teases had only let her!
"Fully recognizing that his moral character
is irreproachable, Fan," said Libbie, "it yet
cannot be concealed that his hands are beetyundeniably, manifestly, incontrovertibly, outrageously, not-to-be-stoodably beety."
'Tis true,'tis pity, and pity'tis,'tis true," 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
said Puss, who was reading up Shakespeare in
a great hurry so as to be ready for that beauideal of a beau who was going to come along
so soon.
"Why girls, are they so very red?" gasped
poor Fan; "I'm not-in love-with him, you
know —but really I didn't notice that they were
so very red!"
"Beets are the only simile," said the merciless Libbie.
As the evenings grew cool in the autumn,
Robert had to be asked into the parlor. One
night the three tormentors got him to sing.
Fannie was on pins and needles, but he thought
she wanted him to sing and sing he did. Now,
Robert had a sweet voice and there was nothing
ludicrous about his singing. But you can find
spots on the sun if you are determined to look
for them.
He'd no sooner gone than the three girls
made a dive at the piano. 
" When other leaps and otherer hearts "
"Oh, Libbie, he didn't sing it in that way! "
groaned Fannie, laughing in spite of herself.
26i
w, 
262    Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
"Then you'll remnemberher me!"
"Flat me-awfully nasal me-the mgi so flat
it's a re," corrected Mamie.
The result of all this was inevitable. Love
could not grow in such an atmosphere. Fannie
began to avoid him. Robert was in truth a
young man  of keen  perceptions  and  great
power of will, and he perceived her aim and
quietly withdrew from  a suit which was not
agreeable.
Fannie didn't mean quite so much as that.
In fact she didn't mean anything-except that
she didn't like to be laughed at quite so much
that was all.
Two years after-and the beau-ideal was as
far from making his appearance as ever-Robert
Stevens's wedding-cards, elegantly engraved,
came to hand. He hadn't seemed ludicrous in
the eyes of the richest, as well as one of the
handsomest and most refined girls in town. In
fact, Fan and her sisters looked up to Miss
Beaumont much as a family of darling, cunning, frisky little King Charles spaniels might
look up to a tall, slender, aristocratic and
altogether  superb  Italian  greyhound.  And 
Get Thee behind He, Satan!    263
Robert had won Miss Beaumont's hand and
heart.
Fan and the three other girls went to. the
wedding.  The church was crowded and they
had to stand right out at the door; almost on
the very steps. When the ceremony was over,
and Robert came out with his bride on his Arm
("White satin and real point," whispered Libbie) he lifted his hat politely, and bowing quite
low (" his trouser-legs perfectly undisturbed
over his instep," said Puss afterwards) he looked
Fan straight in the eye and said, "Good evening, Miss Fanny. Hope I see you well!"
XXX.
You will say that this little story implies the
existence of a sort of love which needs the fos
tering approbation of others to insure its growth
and health.   Do you feel scorn for such love as
this? —say it is unworthy the name?-merits
contempt? Consider conditions.
A girl is reared in a state of absolute dependence on others.  She has-as people call it 
264     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
'no mind of her own." They mean by this
that she has never been taught to use the mind
which she undoubtedly has, and the implication
of lack of mind in her would be resented heartily
enough, if it Were couched in other than the
ambiguous phraseology of these cant expressions
which mean everything and nothing, and all
shades between, as he who utters chooses.
I know a girl-and her case is by no means a
rare one-who never bought a pair of shoes for
herself until after she was twenty years of age.
Flanked-like the girls I have just mentionedby loving sisters, mother, and sometimes also
by cousins and friends, she would proceed to
the shoe-shop, and after the merits of the leather, the sewing, the cut, the finish, and the fit
of the different samples had been judged bv the
assembly, she would find herself the possessor
of the necessary shoes.   You will not laugh
when I tell you that it was a real trial to this
girl when-after her marriage, and when  far
away from her family-she found herself put
to the terrible ordeal of choosing for herself a
pair of shoes. She was, indeed, very much distressed about it. 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
" I don't know whether they fit me or not!"
she whimpered (when the shoemaker asked,
"How  does them do? "), "and I don't know
whether you're cheating me or not. I don't
know whether shoes ought to cost one dollar or
twenty."
Which confession of ignorance was equalled
by a young housekeeper who said to me confidentially, "I positively don't know  whether a
pound of butter is as big as a cheese or as small
as an egg; but I don't think the servants suspect. I always look so wise and shake my head
so disapprovingly at everything."
Gussie and I went to church together, the
other day, to hear a young Congregationalist
minister.   I love the Congregationalist service
-so simple, so earnest, so hearty. No offense to
those dear brothers and sisters who are not Congregationalists, but there is something about
the unassuming simplicity of this service which
wins me more than most others.   However,
that is not the point. The point is, that I was
charmed with this young minister's sermon; so
fresh, so soulful, so honest. I thank you for the
good it did me, young reverend, here on my
12
265 
266     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
printed page. Gussie asked me how I liked it
when we left the church. I told her I was
charmed-was not she?
Y-e-s,-yes."
And then the minister-so young, so honest,
so evidently pure-hearted-was he not one to be
admired?
"Y-e-s" again-yes; but there was a mental
reservation; truthful little Gussie could not conceal that from my prying eyes. By and by out
it came. Did I not think he had Rather a Big
Chin?
Was I surprised? A little. Did I laugh?
No.   Did I treat this curious criticism with
grand contempt-superior scorn? Not at all.
I know the girl-heart and the girl-mind too
well. Besides, I love Gussie dearly, and I consider her a girl of keen intelligence; but she has
not lived so many years as I; and perhaps she
has a girlish beau-ideal of an impossibly beautiful man, like the four-"sisters of the preceding
chapter-a beau-ideal by which she tries even
her ministers on occasion, as well as her beaux.
I granted the undeniable fact that the young
ministe? had Rather a Big Chin-in fact, Quite 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan1!
a Big Chin. What then? Why, that was so
much in his favor!  I cited all the Big Chins of
history-brought up a long line of distinguished
Big Chins, and finally concluded my preach with
an eloquent peroration on the strength, power,
bull-dog perseverance and thorough value of a
well-directed and religious-minded  Big Chin.
And  Gussie saw that  and other  Big Chins
thenceforth with new, and approving, eyes.
Now, what I mean to urge regarding girls in
general is, that their judgment-even the judgment of the bright, intelligent, quick-witted and
discerning among them-is, after all, the callow
judgment ofyouth. And being such, it is likely
to trip on some contemptibly insignificant matter like this of chins, and fall into errors that are
simply appalling to think of.
If there is anything more absurd in all modern civilization than the practice of setting callow girls and green boys to passing judgment on
their fellow-creatures of the opposite sex, with a
view to the gravest relations of life, I cannot
imagine what it is.
It is to me one of the best possible auguries
for the future of a young girl, that she is anx
267 
268     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
ious others should smile upon and approve her
love. In itself, it is a promise of womanly wisdom most cheering to behold. But, like many
another good thing, it needs the right sort of
treatment, if it is to yield good fruit. A peachtree is a good thing, but it will bear no fruit if it
be not properly tended. The very best qualities
in girls are often wasted-die without so much
as a blossom, much less fruit-simply from want
of that sort of care which the good gardener
gives the flower and the good parent the child.
The good gardener does not try to twist the
graceful lily into a climbing vine; he does not
seek to make violets grow on rose-bushes. All
his aim is, to train the plant, and help it to grow
in that direction which is natural to it.
When parents realize that herein-and herein
alone-lies their office, they will not do violence
to their daughters' hearts in anything.  They
will know how to deal with love.
I 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
XXXI.
I RATHER favor the "stern parent," myself.
It is a delicate matter to assail old traditions
in sentimental literature. People rebel so indignantly at anything which seems to lay tisrespectful hands on their sentimental idols.
I have seen daggers looking from the eyes of
painfully young persons when, in speaking to
audiences, I have assailed the favorite old romantic situations of the story-tellers in respect
to the fond heroine who loves the penniless
hero, and wants to live on moonshine instead of
beefsteak.
"It is not so much the man," says the handsome Bella Wilfer, in Our Mutual Friend, "as
the establishment."
It has been the custom of novelists from time
immemorial to hold up to scorn and obloquy
the base creature who marries for an establishment, and to exalt to the seventh heaven of heroinism the young lady who marries for love.
The  "stern  parent," who,  having  been
through years enough of life to have learned
269 
270    Get Thee behind Me, Satan /
common sense, wishes to assure his daughter's
future comfort, according to existing states of
society-the father with some practical knowledge of the cost of bread and butter, and the
shiftlessness of the average young man, becomes
a sharer in the obloquy which falls upon the
mercenary.
But I shudder to think of the state of things
we should presently have on our hands if the
common-sense papas were all to die off suddenly, and leave the girls free to rush headlong into
"love-matches."
Sufficient to the generation is the evil thereof.
It is a blessing that so many papas remain to
act as balance-wheels to the disjointed machinery of youthful passion.
Do I then advocate the marrying for an establishment?
I no more advocate marrying for an establishment than I advocate marrying for fun.
Marrying for fun is,lhowever so very popular among the story-tellers that, for a change, I
should not object to reading a story in which
the heroine should have brains in her head as
well as love-so called-in her heart.  At any 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
rate, I should like to have real-life girls act as if
they were made on that pattern; and before consenting to marry the adorable Charlie or Billy or
Josiah, find out whether the young man is equal
to the requirements of a weekly board-bill for
two, with a prospect of more. If it should be
carried to the extent of finding out whether the
adorable Charlie or Billy or Josiah could pay
house-rent and market bills, and the divers sundries which are involved in "keeping house,"
I should not look upon it as altogether heinous.
I cannot frown upon any human being who
seeks to escape from the typical boarding-house
-that hotbed of scandals and iniquities whose
inventor deserves Sancho Panza's blessing-inverted.
So long as society is arranged in such a manner that the man is the bread-winner and woman's chief duty is to take care of his babies and
keep his house in order, it ought to be a by-law
of the system that no girl shall enter upon wedlock until she sees the house she has to keep as
well as the man she is to keep it for.
But if you think beca-use I say this that I am
271 
272     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
in favor of that common crime known as "marrying for money," you are greatly mistaken.
The woman who dares to put her heart out
of thle question, and without a thought of love
to sell herself to a man whose material wealth
she desires to share is-to put it mildly-a trafficker. That she responds in the proper places
in the marriage-service, holding the hand of the
man to whom she gives her body, but who has
no place in her heart-that she is in the eye of
the lawhenceforth his wife-that does not help
her. In the eye of God she is no more his wife
than I am.
I knew one such woman
Do not, whatever you do, fall into the mistake
of supposing that I do not know dozens of such
women-for I do, and so do you, and so do we
.all.
I knew one such woman, who married a man
she did not love, but whose money she wanted
to finger. She would -have recoiled in horror
from the intimation that she bartered away her
chastity by the act.  She was young, beautiful,
well-bred, and no more inclined to sin than the
rest of us. 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan /!
Soon after her marriage her husband went
into Wall Street and made kites of his money.
Soon after that he took to the flowing bowl for
consolation. Every night he came home to
dinner completely bowled over.
And presently his wife found out that her life
was unbearable and that she hated the drunken
lout to whom she was tied for life. His money
was gone, and with it all was gone which made
him tolerable to her. She had taken a man for
the sake of an "establishment" in the sense
commonly  understood.  And  when  she ran
away one day last spring with a penniless young
dandy whom she had niet at their common
boarding-house, she fancied she had now taken
a man for his own sake.
He had excited "pleasing sensations" in her
discontented breast, and so-for the second'
time-she had outraged wifehood by taking a
man without the marriage of Heaven.
(Webster, you know, defines the verb to love
as "to regard with affection on account of some
qualities which excite pleasing sensations.")
What then are we to marry for, if not for love
nor for an establishment? These are the two
incitements to marriage.
I2*
273
41 
274     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
7e veug bien. Nobody denies that.
You are to marry- if you will pardon my
speaking in a manner somewhat ex cathedra
for True Love, and for nothing else whatever.
But you are to use at least as good a judgment
in the matter as that which a business man uses
in investing his capital-or-you are to-take the
consequences.
You are to treat your love as the precious
soul-capital of your life, and you are no more
to venture it in rash and unconsidered speculations than a wise business man ventures his
money in such a way. He studies the matter
carefully. Do you at least as much. Sometimes he fails in spite of all. So may you.
But then it is your misfortune, not your fault;
and you will bear failure better, in this case, if
you are a true-hearted woman.
If Scylla and Charybdis are pointed out to
you, you can at least try t6 avoid wrecking
yourself upon them.
What is wanted on the one hand is a genuine
sense of VIRTUE, to prevent the cold-hearted
from converting marriage into legalized sin.
What is wanted on the other hand is COM 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
MON SENSE, to prevent the hot-headed from
rushing into the fire of passion as moths rush
into flame.
Marriage is the holiest and loveliest thing
there is in this world. Love is the basis of
marriage. And of no one thing in the world
we inhabit is so much and such hopeless twaddle written as of this same love.
In spite of my deep respect for Noah Webster I think his definition of love is about as
puerile a thing as ever was printed.   Love
cannot be defined.   Nevertheless I see these
truths plainly concerning it:
I. That passion, love's counterfeit, is no more
love than hunger is.
2. That love does not burn with serene and
beautiful flame in the lamp of sordid and unworthy lives.
3. That love does not endure to the end unless it be sustained by virtue in the lover and
the beloved. 
4. And that love will die, just as purity will
vanish, just as men will turn from morality to
sin, from righteousness to crime, where the
causes are sufficient to effect the change.
275 
276    Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
-~ XXXII.
AFTER all, the thing which seems to me most
wonderful in this world is, that truth should be
so old! You think you have discovered something new in the way of advanced thought,
fresh fancy, progressive idea, when, lo and behold! somebody comes along and tells you the
Chinese had it fifteen hundred centuries before
Christ.   Confucius had it set to music, and
Solomon danced a pas seul to it on the backstoop of his Temple.
As  many  as a hundred  times during the
progress of this book; have been on the point
of scratching out this and that sentence because
somebody else said something like that long
ago; then I have hesitated, because if I once
began with that idea, I felt I might as well
scratch the whole book out and be done with it.
After that, to be conrsistent, I might go and
scratch myself out, because I individually have
been repeated ever since God made Eve; my
hair, my  eyes, my nose, my ears, my  teeth,
have all passed through a most bewildering
I 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
number of editions; and yet our neighbor Mrs.
Perkins had last night a little daughter, and
the whole household is as much fluttered and
excited about it as if this little daughter were
Number One of a new species.
I hate to feel called on to quote that tattered
and torn Solomoqism which gasps forth'every
day that there is nothing new under the sun.
Yet most emphatically this is thus. There is
not a grand thought preached from any pulpit,
-there is not a noble line penned on any page,
which has not been thought ages ago, which
has not been penned long years before any of
us were born.   You  may turn your phrase
freshly, you may clothe your idea in quaint neologisms, but the idea has been used before,
be sure of it. It has been said-and betted
upon (which indicates a stronger certainty with
some people)-that there is not a brilliant
thought the human mind is capable of thinking
which has not bee.n brillianLly thought and well
expressed by Shakespeare.   I have been familiar with Shakespeare since my earliest girlhood, yet it never struck me that the Bard had
said. But wait.
277 
278     Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
We have three birds-gorgeous bits of color,
rarely seen here in the North. They are called
"Nonpareils" in the South, and they are bright
gems of the tropics quite glorious to behold.
The man of whom we bought them in Savannah
told me to kill flies occasionally and give them
to the birds as tit-bits, and they would soon
learn to love me and to welcome my approach
to their cage.   But at the outset I discover
that I don't like to kill flies.   I recoil at the
necessity of winning the affection of the girds
by assuming the ro'e of fly-assassin. I am such
a great, powerful monster beside this curious
little hop-o'-ty-skip which runs familiarly along
my page as I write, that it seems not only cruel
but cowardly in me to deliberately smash it,
and make mourning in its family, when it is not
doing me the least harm. And here is my new
idea: Is it not possible that we mortals may be
the poor insects scampering about in a seemingly-often really-idiotic manner-building
our little monuments, as ants do their hills, only
to be kicked over by thoughtless boys; that
we are the insignificant hop-o'-ty-skips running
along the printed page of some mighty Jove
a 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
or Jupiter who deliberately smashes us and
winds up our career forever? This idea I had
thought quite new-really original-and had
intended to elaborate it some day in print in
a humorous fashion; when husband informed
me that it was as old as the hills.
"Old?" I gasped, amazed.
"Why, certainly! the Chinese discovered it
fifteen hundred centuries before Christ. Confucius set it to music and Solomon
Oh, do stop, Mister Teaze!"
"Well then, behold! look here in Shakespeare
"' As flies to wanton boys, so we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.'         KING  LEAR."
-So now I am more than ever convinced that
Solomon was right; and that the truth will
bear infinite repetition. It is only error that
grows stale, flaf, and unprofitable with repeated
utterance.
It is a good thing to speak the truth once
it is better to speak it twice; and it is best to
speak it all the time. Repetition is only another name for agitation, and if you mean to do
any good in this world you must persistently
hammer away.
279
Ie. 
280     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
XXXIII.
I REMEMBER when I was a child that I often
wondered if all the birds had nests. As if there
could be any difficulty about building a nest,
with all the countless trees in the forest ready
to build in! Yet, who knows what conditions
of ornithological social life may trammel and
regulate the free action of birds? There are
not more trees.in the forests than there are
twenty-by-one-hundred-foot building lots on
the face of the great globe. Yet not every
man has a nest. You would think, with the
great globe to choose from, that every man
would build him a home. The materials for
his house are as profuse at hand as those which
go to building the birds' nests, are they not?
Only labor is required; and that the bird gives.
Why not man? Especially when the term of
deepest pity, the profoundest word-symbol of
an abject, pitiable, and unfriended condition is
-" homeless! "
So great an influence is wielded by the homelife, so intimately are love for individuals and 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
love of home blended, that I am almost convinced a law should be passed, that none should
marry except on condition that they go at once
into a home of their own.  Not a room, nor a
suite of rooms, in a hotel or boarding-house, but
a Home-a spot of earth sacred to the household gods, and over whose threshold none may
pass but by the permission of the man and wife
who dwell together therein.
For there is so much that is softening and
soothing-so much that is peaceful, reposeful,
restful in the bare idea of a nook which you
independently inhabit, that the ruggedest nature
cannot but feel it. The fiercest barbarian that
ever roamed the woods is more mild, more peaceable in his hut-home. Turn from his comfortable, cheerful home the gentlest man you knowforce him to beat about the four corners of the
city, now lying in this strange bed, now eating
at that uncongenial board, his lares and penates
scattered, his familiar surroundings vanished,
and in a little time you will not be able to
recognize your once amiable man in this soured,
petulant, distressed creature who has been so
unfortunate as to lose his home.
28i 
282     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Hammering away in a moral smithy, I find
that sometimes the sparks fly. But the faithful
workman does not quit his work, if perchance a
spark should light upon his bared arm, and
sting.   He rubs the spot a moment perhaps,
but he goes on hammering presently.
I have been stung on occasion, but } have not
on that account struck any the less cordially the
moment after.
It has been my plan, since I became in some
sense a worker for reform, to note carefully and
respectfully all criticisms on me and my work,
and to reply to them, directly or indirectly, as
occasion would allow.   As I do not swing a
wooden sword myself, so I like to see the weapons of others sharp and keen, even though they
cut me sometimes  cruelly.   And  the keener
they are, the truer my respect for an honorable
antagonist.
My critics have been numerous and active;
they have given me abundant cause to defend
myself; and in defending myself I try to hit as
hard as they-but I respect their activity, energy, and skill even while I strike-when they
are honorable opponents. - 
Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
There is a paper still feebly published in this
city, which assiduously occupied itself for several months in trying to attract my attention,
by belching forth column after column of the
vilest calumny at me. Many friends wondered
why I did not reply to it. Here and now I will
tell you why: Not because its argumentswere
unanswerable; far from it; they were weaker
than water-but because in its anxiety to goad
me into replying, it descended to falsehood, to
scurrility, to indecent disregard of the code of
gentility which should be the guide-manual of
editors and gentlemen. Taking one of my articles on theatrical indecency for a pretended
theme of criticism, it left criticism idle to vilify
me personally, to charge me with base motives,
and, instead of endeavoring to pick my argument to pieces, trying to find somewhere in my
Past a proof that I was a hypocrite now. The
imbecility of this course in a professedly critical
journal was so idiotic, that'had it been merely
idiotic I should have laughed at itr and given it
a good-natured, though contemptuous whack
over the shoulders with my sword. But there
is sometimes linked to idiocy a species of dia
283 
284     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
bolic cunning-a treacherous, fiendish, horrible
cruelty of intention-which manifests itself in
the most disgusting and frightful wickedness.
In the instance I am considering, idiocy of critical purpose passed thus into the diabolism which
has no-hesitation as to its means, so that it may
accomplish its ends, and-as with the idiocy of
the asylums-in its eagerness to wreak its will,
is heedless of the injury it inflicts upon itself.
Seeing this, I put up my sword at once. I
would not lower myself so far as to do battle
with such an antagonist.
It was evident that this paper believed it could
goad me into a reply or into the institution of a
libel suit, and that this would attract attention
to it, and advertise it. This is an old game
with the publishers of unprofitable newspapers,
and it has often been a successful one; but it is
too transparent ever to deceive me. My lips
were at once sealed; and so far as mentioning
the name of this journal is concerned, they are
sealed forever. I resolved that not one line of
advertising should I ever give it, though it
charged me. and all my family, and every one of
my friends, with every crime known to the
calendar. 
Get Thee behind  Me, Satan!
The old gentleman in the fire-red tights, and
the red isinglass eyelids-he who is ever
finding some mischief still for idle hands to dois never so well pleased as when he gets hold of
one of those writers for the press whose delight
it is to rake over the dead leaves of the Past in
search of buried misdeeds.
It is a part of the duty of a newspaper, we must
admit, to take cognizance in its columns of passing events, and if crimes are perpetrated, or
wrongs done, to give an account of them as
matters of news, and perhaps comment upon
them editorially also.
Thus, if you should go out some fine day and
pick somebody's pocket it would be quite right
that all the newspapers should chronicle your
offense; nor could you complain if the editors
should point out to their readers the wickedness
of pocket-picking as illustrated by you.
But, on the other hand, if you had picked a
pocket ten years ago, and borne the consequences o'your offenseat the time-and since
then had lived a correct life, a life utterly void
of offense, or, still better, a life of charity and
usefulness, it would then indeed be most cruel
.285 
286     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
and wicked for any newspaper of to-day to entertain its readers with an account of your old
offense, so as to give you pain now and perhaps interfere with your present usefulness.
The man who repents-and who follows up
repentance with good works, with a life of honorable effort-this man before all others is worthy
of our sympathy. We have the testimony of
the Bible that such men are the best beloved of
Heaven, and that there is more joy in heaven 
over onfe sinner that repents, than over many
who have never gone astray.
There is an Italian proverb which says: "If
the faults of the best and purest of men were
written on his forehead,' he would pull his cap
over his eyes."
I suppose there is no exception to this rule
not one-and has never been since Christ
lived.
The person who  rakes up some forgotten
peccadillo of yours-even some expiated and
buried crime-to injure your influence for the
right and true, which you are laboring earnestly
to manifest in the present, is guilty of a heinous
offense He is laboring in the service of Satan; 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!  287
his work is that of a Scavenger; and he is
without excuse in any honorable soul.
If a man-or let us say a woman-had
violated every commandment in the decalogue
-if she had been a drunkard and a thief, a liar,
a slanderer, and-well yes, even a free-lover-I
say that the farther in the past she leaves these
offenses, the more worthy she is of the goodwill of all true Christian men and women; and
the man or journal which seeks to revive the
unhappy Past that it may darken the Present,
is a graver offender than his victim ever was.
But if this be so, by what terms shall I characterize the fiendishness of the editor who in
his anger at the worthy Robinson should go
prowling into the Past, trying to discover if in
some forgotten grave there lies not some folly
or weakness of which some cherished friend of
Robinson's, or some member of Robinson'sfamily, has been guilty, and coloring the simplest
incidents with the hues of HIades, dangles them
in Robinson's face with an air of saying, " Do
you see that, sir? We fling this in your face!
How do you like this?  What have you to say
to this?  Your grandmother, or your uncle, or 
288     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
your second cousin's husband did this! And
what have you to say ntow? Answer us if you
can, sir! Aha! Answer us if you can!"
And a skinny Mephistopheles rubs his hands
and chuckles in the background.
I have refused to look in the Past of even
Mrs. Freelove in search of her records.  Her record may be what it may-I hold that her present position before the public is all the public
has to deal with.
I lectured last winter at a certain pretty
village in New York State, and took occasion in
the course'of my remarks to pay my attentions
to the Satan of free-love in the phrase which
forms the title of this book. The next day on
the cars there glided up to me a youngish sort
of man, dressed in threadbare black, without
gloves on his bony hands, with a sandy and
befreckled complexion, and great round staring
eyes, whose color seemed to match his complexion so perfectly that they may have been
red too, for all impression they made to the
contrary. At any rate, they were unsheltered
by any visible eyelash, and unadorned by any 
Get Thzee behind Me, Satan!
visible eyebrow; and looking at them you
wondered if such eyes were not painful to carry
about in their wide and blank openness.
As I turned from the window I found this
seedy and creeping man standing by my side.
He asked me if I were I. And I answered,
"Ay."  Without further parley he seated-himself by my side. My olfactories are very
delicate, and he was musty as well as shabby
and red.
"I was at-" and his voice was quavering
and high and shrill-" your lecter last evenin'.
I am just startin' on a lecter tower myself."
In reporting this man's conversation I do not
exaggerate, as a fictionist might, for the purpose
of heightening the effect of the picture.
The man  was a complete surprise to me.
Malapropisms are common on the stage and in
books, but this was, I think, the only person I
ever met who audaciously used certain words
which are a little out of,the common, and
pronounced them in the most outrageously
grotesque manner.
"Yes," he continued, giving me the benefit
of his plans-and if there is anything more imp
I3
289
W. 
290     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
pertinent than for an utter stranger to sit down
uninvited beside you when there is plenty of
room elsewhere, and begin to talk to you of his
projects about himself, which are not of the
slightest interest to you, I know not what it is.
I am startin' on my fust lecter tower.  I am
goin' to speak on the Cause." 
"What cause?" I asked, with a mechanical
politeness. Those years I passed in France
have ingrained in my nature a certain suavity
of manner of which on occasion I would gladly
be rid; and which showed itself for a few minutes during this interview in a decently courteous reception of an insolent and offensive
person.
"Why, the Cause! Woman! Seifrage! Oh,
woman is a slave! She is bound! She shall be
free!"
I shrunk from the person as far as the seat
would permit, so sincere was the disgust with
which the slimy creature inspired me.
"Yes,  I'm  goin'  inter  Cernecticut    ter
Bridgeport; thar I shall meet the Reverund
Miss Atlas Smith    Do you know  Reverund
Atlas Smith?" 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
I did not. I was looking out of the window.
He addressed me again.
"This will be my deebutt as alecterer."
I turned and stared at this worm.  Excuse
me, worms; the simile is degrading to you, but
our language is faulty in some respects, and a
linguistic peculiarity alone the cause of tfhis insult which likens a most offensive and immoral
creature to a harmless and inoffensive little thing
like yourselves.
"I hev an exception to take to your lecter,"
said the worm, rubbing his knuckly hand on his
hard, rasping chin, through the skin of which a
stubble of red beard was trying to push its way.
"You objected to the ductrines of Sister Freelove!"
I
I began to feel a dawning sense of relief. He
went on.
"The ductrines of Sister Freelove I know is
not pop'ler-people is agin'em ginerally. I
em a lawyer here in our town, and represuntations was made to me which-which in fact indooced me to espouse the cause of Sister Freelove-and I felt called on to pernounce my protest agin the views you took in your lecter last
night."
291 
292     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
"You are too kind, sir.  I am deeply obliged
to you. It is a pleasure, sir, to receive your
protest."
"Be keerful!" said he, and his red face grew
redder, and his hair grew stiffer, and his bony
hand scraped his bony chin more nervously
than before; "thar will be a day of reckonin'
fer them who set theirselves up agin Sister
Freelove. She has got the most extrawd'nary
mind of any woman livin', and she is agoin'
to occupy a powerful pusition and she will
remember her friends.   So we air bound to
rally round her. She is abreakin' the way fer
future generations. Them thet is not with us
is aginst us, and we shell use the weepins of
defense.   You will hev to change yqur tone
if you expect to escape. We shell not allow
ourselves to be calumerniated with impunity,
mam.   I hev heerd all the lecters that hes
been given in our town this winter, but none,
no none, hes aroused-my anermosity ekal to
yourn."
"Then for once," I said to him with a flush
of real delight, "I am satisfied with myself.
I glow with pleasure to think that I have done 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
something that calls for the disapprobation of
the low, the vile, the degraded, the creatures
who make a boast of their shame. How could
I look myself in the face in the glass to-night
if I had done something to merit the approval of those who hold your doctrines! You
have given me a moment of sincere'pleasure, Mr. Freelover, and I know of nothing
now you can do to add to my comfort except
to change your seat."
His face had reached such a climax of redness that it was one Glare.   Mephistopheles
always affects red. He Got him Behind me,
and left me at peace with myself and all the
world.
XXXIV.
SOMETIMES when I look back over the manuscript leaves of this book I am tempted to
destroy it. Why? Why, because it would cut
me to the heart if any reader should so misconstrue the spirit of this unpretentious volume as
to believe that I had therein set myself up-or
293 
294     Get Thee behind Me, Satan'!
set any of the sitters at our Table or the Table
itself up-as model characters. There is not a
home  in the land where happiness may not
come and live as it lives in our home, if the
occupants of that home will invite it, woo it, as
we have done. There are homes far richer;
whose attractions to the esthetic sense are much
more powerful than ours; where glorious picture
galleries delight the eye of their owners; where
superb statuary stirs their pulses to admiration
of its grace; where leafy parks call them to
poetic strolling; where blooming flowers of
tropic climes flame their gorgeous hues and
shame even that chef dcauvre of your celebrated
painter for which a fortune has just been paid.
Our home would joy to have these things; but
not having them, it can have that which these
alone will fail to bring-and so can yours,
reader, though your home be poorer still than
ours.
If I have spoken lovingly of our dear onesof our Rebecca, our Algie, our beloved W.-it
is not because they have no faults to the eye
which chooses to see faults, I suppose; but the
eye of love does not so choose, and should 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
not. Rebecca I maintain is one of the dearest
women ever sent on earth to bless all those
with whom she comes in contact; yet, I grieve
to say, Rebecca is frequently reminded by a
pain there, that she has a back.   This  you
know is far from being the ideal woman we fain
would have; and Rebecca says the next time
she comes into the world she'll take my advice
and go romp in the woods and jump off the
barn and drive her father's cow home (the
things W. did, she says), so that she'll be good
and strong. Our Algie is the noble little fellow
I have tried to picture him; a muscular, symmetrical juvenile gladiator, who is as strong as
a young lion, and as gentle as a lamb. Affectionate, incapable of falsehood, hating what is
wicked, adoring what is right, truly imbued
with a beautiful religious spirit, he at the same
time freely acknowledges that fun " suits him,"
and is so far removed from the wonderful young
prig who is a model of all the virtues, social,
religious, and scholastic, that it frequently has
to be urged upon his attention that his heels,
seen from an upper window as he throws somersaults over the area railings, are not pleasing
295 
296     Get Thee behind Me, Satan'!
to the eye of taste; and that in preparing his
linen for the wash the introduction of two l's
in the word  "collars"  would  elucidate  his
meaning to the laundress.   And  our W.what of him?   No, no-not a word-not  a
breath, dear friends-he is faultless!
The true and only miscreant is IX I have
already alluded to the Vesuvian character of
my  temper.    Sarah  Hoggins  episodes  enrage me, while all the rest of our folks are as
smooth and unruffled as a placid stream.   I
am trying to improve myself in this regard.
I am learning brave lessons from the beautiful
equable characters of the noble people, for
placing me among whom, God has my nightly
thanks. Luther was a man of violent temper,
but he curbed it.  Temper is hideous in a
woman.   Every day I make  these mistakes
and I repent them in sackcloth and ashes.
And I improve.   Trifles have no longer the
power to chafe me, as opce they had; but never,
I think, shall I succeed in vanquishing that hot
rage which seizes me when weak and wicked
men and women struggle to pollute the name
of blessed Love, and kill the gentle household
gods, which poor humanity so ill can spare. 
Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
Then do I thank God I have a voice which
thousands upon thousands of people hear, every
year. Then do I rejoice that, woman as I am,
I load no Quaker-gun when I put pen to
paper.
Sometimes those who iove me remonstrate
with me for spending my strength in fighting
windmills. Is this Freelove monster but a windmill? Am I fighting nothing? Pray God it
may be so.  If it be, then many people of
sound judgment are mistaken.
Our usually cool Rebecca is greatly agitated
by it. "Are not girls frivolous enough, irresponsible, unthinking enough now? Shall they
be urged to more weakness-more wickedness?
Hitherto they have been pure at least-if no
more."
Even sage W. shakes his head. "Bad teachings for the warm blood of our Algie-at this
moment when he is about to enter manhood
with all its temptations."
And just as we are talking, Algie runs in,
screaming with laughter, and holding a copy of
an illustrated paper in his hand.
"What's the matter, Algie?"
13*
297 
298     Get Thee behind Me, Satan!
"Why look here," he says, "here's a picture
of that nasty old Mrs. Freelove, and the artist
has printed under it  "'  GET THEE BEHIND ME (MRS.) SATAN!'"
THE END.
MAY 1 8 1915
I