; and being a perfectly
idle person, her days are apt to be passed in a way especially devised by
Satan for unoccupied hands. She has learned no cooking from her mother;
"going to market" has become a thing of the past. So she falls a victim
to the allurements of the bargain-counter; returning home after hours of
aimless wandering, irritable and aggrieved because she cannot own the
beautiful things she has seen. She passes the evening in trying to win
her husband's consent to some purchase he knows he cannot afford, while
it breaks his heart to refuse her--some object, which, were she really
his companion, she would not have had the time to see or the folly to ask
for.

The janitor in our building is truly a toiler. He rarely leaves his
dismal quarters under the sidewalk, but "Madam" walks the streets clad in
sealskin and silk, a "Gainsborough" crowning her false "bang." I always
think of Max O'Rell's clever saying, when I see her: "The sweat of the
American husband crystallizes into diamond ear-rings for the American
woman." My janitress sports a diminutive pair of those jewels and has
hopes of larger ones! Instead of "doing" the bachelor's rooms in the
building as her husband's helpmeet, she "does" her spouse, and a char-
woman works for her. She is one of the drops in the tide that ebbs and
flows on Twenty-third Street--a discontented woman placed in a false
position by our absurd customs.

Go a little further up in the social scale and you will find the same
"detached" feeling. In a household I know of only one horse and a
_coupe_ can be afforded. Do you suppose it is for the use of the weary
breadwinner? Not at all. He walks from his home to the "elevated." The
carriage is to take his wife to teas or the park. In a year or two she
will go abroad, leaving him alone to turn the crank that produces the
income. As it is, she always leaves him for six months each year in a
half-closed house, to the tender mercies of a caretaker. Two additional
words could be advantageously added to the wedding service. After "for
richer for poorer," I should like to hear a bride promise to cling to her
husband "for winter for summer!"

Make another step up and stand in the entrance of a house at two A.M.,
just as the cotillion is commencing, and watch the couples leaving. The
husband, who has been in Wall Street all day, knows that he must be there
again at nine next morning. He is furious at the lateness of the hou