ill be impaired by keeping."
With the simplicity natural to men of high intelligence, he does not
hesitate to confess that he finds beauty even in kitchen utensils
orderly arranged.

The young wife is enchanted at his idea, and they go through the house
assigning a place for each thing; they distribute duties to the slaves,
and give them other instructions, with the endeavor to win their
affections and elevate their characters. Ischomachus then tells her that
all care will be useless if the mistress of the house do not watch to
see that the established order is not disturbed. Comparing her to
magistrates who make the laws of a city respected, he adds: "This, dear
wife, I chiefly commend to you, that you may look upon yourself as chief
overseer of the laws within our house."

He tells her that it is within her jurisdiction to oversee everything in
the house, as a garrison commander inspects his soldiers; that she has
as great power in her own home as a queen, to distribute rewards to the
virtuous and diligent and to punish those who deserve it. He desires her
not to be displeased that he has intrusted more to her than to any of
the servants, for they have not the same incentive to preserve those
things which are not their own but hers.

Up to this time, it is the loving and inexperienced child who has been
conversing with her husband. Now, it is the woman, the mistress of the
house, who says:

"It would have been a great grief to me if, instead of those good rules
you instruct me in for the welfare of our house, you had directed me to
have no regard to the possessions I am endowed with; for as it is
natural for a good woman to be careful and diligent about her own
children rather than to have a disregard for them, so it is no less
agreeable and pleasant to a woman, who has any share of sense, to look
after the affairs of her family rather than to neglect them."

The great Socrates admires much the wisdom of his friend's wife, and
adds, asking Ischomachus to continue the narrative: "It is far more
delightful to hear the virtuous woman described than if the famous
painter Zeuxis were to show me the portrait of the fairest woman in the
world."

This dialogue between husband and wife is doubtless typical of the
relations between married couples in the Athenian household, and in the
girl-wife one may recognize the innocence and ingenuousness of the
average maiden of fifteen transferred from the seclusion of her girlhoo