My talk concerns one side of woman's life; it concerns her spiritual and literary being. What does woman among us do to support this spiritual, literary being? And consequently, I may rightly ask: what does woman do for the sake of her general culture — that culture which makes her take an actual part in the spiritual endeavors of the world, so that she lives at the very heart of this deep spiritual world, and not on its margins?

And I may rightly be more explicit, and ask my sister woman: What do you read? What do you read?

I am fully confident that this ques-tion of mine may be the hardest question we could put to our ladies in society; and I am confident that if woman among us were confronted, at some hour, with a call to take over the government of the country, she would not stand in such perplexity as she stands before this question.

What do you read? — meaning, what is the measure of your share in coming to know the treasures of the human mind, and the discoveries of thought and spirit in the cause of truth and goodness?

What do you read? — meaning, what do you do to come out of the narrow bounds of your own self, out of your inertia and your petrifaction, into the wide human sphere, where you become a mind, a thought, and a spirit, sharing

with thousands of minds and spirits and thoughts?

What do you read? — meaning, what do you do to build up the spiritual side in yourself, and con-sequently in your family, then in your society, then in the world??

I do not address this question to those women who live among inkwells and books, letters and pens — and how few they are in this country — but I address it to the ladies who have received some measure of education, and then stopped in the middle of the road!

How little we read, and how cheap is what we read. How little we read — and most of our homes are bare of that elegant, radiant corner we call a "library."

A friend of mine, who lives with her husband a life of the mind and spirit, saturated with reading, whose home is adorned by a rich and precious library, told me:

A wealthy lady visited me, accompanied by her little boy,

and no sooner had the house received them than the child began moving from corner to corner, touching the books with great astonishment, and he asked his mother:

— "Why, Mama, do we not have beautiful books like these, when our house surpasses this one in its grandeur and the richness of its furniture?"

And his mother answers him, hushing him and bidding him sit down:

"These people are teachers, my dear, and books are part of their business; but we are merchants, and we have no interest in libraries and books."

Madam, it is not right that there should be this difference in our intellectual life. There are groups who live, as one ought to live, in the atmosphere of the book — and this group is almost confined to the educated middle class.

And there are other groups who do not know a book by sight; and most of them, regrettably, belong to the rich class, which lives a life of luxury and idleness, feeding its body with all the extravagance and excess that matter affords, while starving its spirit and its mind, until it ends up crippled in mind and spirit.

In our homes there is an abundance of furnishings — carpets and curtains, chandeliers and lights... for the eye, in every corner, a garden of beauty and elegance; for the pampered body there is everything in our homes, everything for the body alone — and rarely do we find in our homes that corner which warms the spirit and colors our inner life with knowledge.

How little we read... and the whole budget of our homes is spent in pampering this body —

soft bedding, fine food, ease and pleasure — so that the belly in us is filled, while the mind remains empty and hollow, crying out from its hunger and its thirst...

How poor our homes are, for all their wealth and luxury, when there is not in them so much as the shadow of a book — the book that is the mind's treasure for the whole family!! It is the treasure of the woman, as mother, as wife, and as a useful member of this society; it is the treasure of the father, as a human being who gives his blessing and strives for a principle or a creed; it is the treasure of childhood, growing up in the shade of knowledge and the