when we are
entertaining strangers whose good opinion we wish to propitiate. We
dress ourselves with care, we study what it will be agreeable to say, we
do not suffer our natural laziness to prevent our being very alert in
paying small attentions, we start across the room for an easier chair,
we stoop to pick up the fan, we search for the mislaid newspaper, and
all this for persons in whom we have no particular interest beyond the
passing hour; while with those friends whom we love and respect we sit
in our old faded habiliments, and let them get their own chair, and look
up their own newspaper, and fight their own way daily, without any of
this preventing care.

"In the matter of personal adornment, especially, there are a great many
people who are chargeable with the same fault that I have already spoken
of in reference to household arrangements. They have a splendid wardrobe
for company, and a shabby and sordid one for domestic life. A woman puts
all her income into party-dresses, and thinks anything will do to wear
at home. All her old tumbled finery, her frayed, dirty silks and soiled
ribbons, are made to do duty for her hours of intercourse with her
dearest friends. Some seem to be really principled against wearing a
handsome dress in every-day life; they 'cannot afford' to be
well-dressed in private. Now what I should recommend would be to take
the money necessary for one or two party-dresses and spend it upon an
appropriate and tasteful home-toilette, and to make it an avowed object
to look prettily at home.

"We men are a sort of stupid, blind animals: we know when we are
pleased, but we don't know what it is that pleases us; we say we don't
care anything about flowers, but if there is a flower-garden under our
window, somehow or other we are dimly conscious of it, and feel that
there is something pleasant there; and so when our wives and daughters
are prettily and tastefully attired, we know it, and it gladdens our
life far more than we are perhaps aware of."

"Well, papa," said Jennie, "I think the men ought to take just as much
pains to get themselves up nicely after marriage as the women. I think
there are such things as tumbled shirt-collars and frowzy hair and muddy
shoes brought into the domestic sanctuary, as well as frayed silks and
dirty ribbons."

"Certainly," I said; "but you know we are the natural Hottentot, and
you are the missionaries who are to keep from degenerating; we are the
clumsy, ol