will rent for as much as a charming
villa should command.

But while we ask now for immediate relief by clubs and rental
establishments, the great practical and artistic problem of America
still remains in learning to manage its civilization; in acquiring a
forecaste, a system, that meets individual wants; in adjusting resource
to requirement. Then we shall not be driven into association. It is
jocosely said, that in the West, whose rivers are shallow and uncertain,
the steamers are built to run on a heavy dew. Allowing for the joke,
this is not more nice than wise. To be dexterous, fine-fingered, facile!
How perfect is the response in all the petty personalities of politics!
In this America, where all men aspire, and more men get office than one
would think there were offices to get, what miracles of adroitness! It
is one perpetual, Turn, turn again, Lord Mayor! If but half the genius
were diverted from office-getting to house-building, what towering
results! But since it is the misery of a republic that politics is
supreme, and that a people who govern themselves can have little leisure
for anything else, I have sometimes feared that the only way to get
these woman questions through is by tacking them on to politics. If,
then, any of our masculine friends now go to Congress on an amelioration
of labor, Heaven speed the day when they can only go on an amelioration
of lodgings.

But on this side of the question we as yet hold close to the leeward.
For to make it political, women must have political power, the power of
the ballot; and this claim she chooses to defer to the more oppressed
race,--chooses first to secure justice to all men, before entering the
long campaign of justice to women.

Meanwhile, we young housekeepers, who are neither capitalists to build
what we need, nor politicians to procure it builded, can only live on
these real-unreal lives as we may. But sometimes, when the city lamps
are agleam in the early evening, we go out for a walk of romance upon
the brilliant avenue near by, gazing eagerly into those superb
drawing-rooms where the curtains are kindly lifted a little, and tempted
to ring at the door on a false errand where they are not,--simply to get
a peep at the captivating comfort inside. And thus we too possess houses
and homes; with all these to enjoy and none of them to care for, why may
not one easily remain the wealthiest person in the universe? Ah, no one
knows what riches we have in o