e
mamma who is successively cook, and chambermaid, and nurse; and this is
the reason why matrons fade and are overworked.

"Now, Mr. Rudolph, do you think a woman any less beautiful or
interesting because she is a fully developed physical being,--because
her muscles have been rounded and matured into strength, so that she can
meet the inevitable emergencies of life without feeling them to be
distressing hardships? If there be a competent, well-trained servant to
sweep and dust the parlor, and keep all the machinery of the house in
motion, she may very properly select her work out of the family, in some
form of benevolent helpfulness; but when the inevitable evil hour comes,
which is likely to come first or last in every American household, is a
woman any less an elegant woman because her love of neatness, order, and
beauty leads her to make vigorous personal exertions to keep her own
home undefiled? For my part, I think a disorderly, ill-kept home, a
sordid, uninviting table, has driven more husbands from domestic life
than the unattractiveness of any overworked woman. So long as a woman
makes her home harmonious and orderly, so long as the hour of assembling
around the family table is something to be looked forward to as a
comfort and a refreshment, a man cannot see that the good house fairy,
who by some magic keeps everything so delightfully, has either a wrinkle
or a gray hair.

"Besides," said I, "I must tell you, Rudolph, what you fellows of
twenty-one are slow to believe; and that is, that the kind of ideal
paradise you propose in marriage is, in the very nature of things, an
impossibility,--that the familiarities of every-day life between two
people who keep house together must and will destroy it. Suppose you are
married to Cytherea herself, and the next week attacked with a rheumatic
fever. If the tie between you is that of true and honest love, Cytherea
will put on a gingham wrapper, and with her own sculptured hands wring
out the flannels which shall relieve your pains; and she will be no true
woman if she do not prefer to do this to employing any nurse that could
be hired. True love ennobles and dignifies the material labors of life;
and homely services rendered for love's sake have in them a poetry that
is immortal.

"No true-hearted woman can find herself, in real, actual life, unskilled
and unfit to minister to the wants and sorrows of those dearest to her,
without a secret sense of degradation. The fe