t she promise to obey? Didn't she? Of course. Then why is it
that I must be all the while yielding points, and she never? Well,
sir, that is for you to settle. The marriage service gives you
authority; so does the law of the land. John could lock up Mrs. Lillie
till she learned her lessons; he could do any of twenty other things
that no gentleman would ever think of doing, and the law would support
him in it. But, because John is a gentleman, and not Paddy from Cork,
he strokes his wife's head, and submits.

We understand that our brethren, the Methodists, have recently decided
to leave the word "obey" out of the marriage-service. Our friends are,
as all the world knows, a most wise and prudent denomination, and
guided by a very practical sense in their arrangements. If they have
left the word "obey" out, it is because they have concluded that it
does no good to put it in,--a decision that John's experience would go
a long way to justify.

CHAPTER XIII.

_JOHN'S BIRTHDAY_.

"My dear Lillie," quoth John one morning, "next week Wednesday is my
birthday."

"Is it? How charming! What shall we do?"

"Well, Lillie, it has always been our custom--Grace's and mine--to
give a grand _fete_ here to all our work-people. We invite them all
over _en masse_, and have the house and grounds all open, and devote
ourselves to giving them a good time."

Lillie's countenance fell.

"Now, really, John, how trying! what shall we do? You don't really
propose to bring all those low, dirty, little factory children in
Spindlewood through our elegant new house? Just look at that satin
furniture, and think what it will be when a whole parcel of freckled,
tow-headed, snubby-nosed children have eaten bread and butter and
doughnuts over it! Now, John, there is reason in all things; _this_
house is not made for a missionary asylum."

John, thus admonished, looked at his house, and was fain to admit that
there was the usual amount of that good, selfish, hard grit--called
common sense--in Lillie's remarks.

Rooms have their atmosphere, their necessities, their artistic
proprieties. Apartments _a la_ Louis Quatorze represent the ideas
and the sympathies of a period when the rich lived by themselves in
luxury, and the poor were trodden down in the gutter; when there was
only aristocratic contempt and domination on one side, and servility
and smothered curses on the other. With the change of the apartments
to the style of that past era