Tell me, dear ones, what piece of news, in which you are not personally concerned, stirs you most, and excites the greatest interest? Is it not the tidings of a friend’s engagement?
What confidences are so sacred as those that tell of happy, hopeful love? Think of your girl friend who, with sweet shyness, hid her blushing face on your shoulder, and repeated in a whisper the words lately spoken by that one who had of late become more to her than all the world besides. Did not your own heart thrill with sympathetic gladness as you listened? Were you not proud of her confidence, and did you not feel more honoured by it than by any trust she had reposed in you before?
She had told you of her joys and sorrows, her hopes and fears on other subjects, many a time, and you had listened and sympathised. But all the rest sank into insignificance when compared with the importance of the future now opening before her. Her confidence was mingled with both smiles and tears—happy tears you were sure—and you too were ready to laugh and cry by turns, as you clasped her in your arms, and kissed her, telling her between whiles how truly you rejoiced in her joy.
I can picture you going homeward with the news, so delighted to tell it that your walk breaks into a run in your eagerness, and yet as you go, you perhaps think to yourself, “I wonder if such happiness will come to me also. Shall I some day reciprocate such confidence as my friend has placed in me?”
As you asked yourself the question, did some known face come before your mind’s eye and bring to your cheek a self-conscious flush? Not a flush of shame. Far be it from me to suggest such a thing. You have no need to shrink from owning that you do look forward hopefully to the possibility of being one day the loved and trusted partner of some good man, and, if God so wills it, the mother of his children.
The prospect of being a wife and a mother involves alike the most sacred, vast, and yet delightful responsibilities. How can you be fit to undertake such, if you have given them no serious thought beforehand, or striven to qualify yourself for them?
Having myself known such an ideally happy married life that the very memory of it makes me unspeakably rich now, in the days of my widowhood, how I long to see my experiences repeated in the lives of those who are to be the wives and mothers of the future!