the money-bags is
entitled by popular verdict to his or her jest. Her pretended railing
was "clear fun."

The deeper and juster significance of the much derided clause of the
marriage vow is the second I have offered. "Live and let live" is a
motto that should begin, continue and be best exemplified at home. The
wife either earns an honorable livelihood, or she is a licensed
mendicant. The man who, after a careful estimate of the services
rendered by her who keeps the house, manages his servants, or does the
work of the servants he does not hire; who bears and brings up his
children in comfort, respectability and happiness; who looks after his
clothing and theirs; nurses him and them in illness, and makes the
world lovely for him in health--does not consider that his wife has
paid her way thus far, and is richly entitled to all he has given or
will ever give her--is not fit to conduct any business upon business
principles. If he be sensible and candid, let him decide what salary
he can afford to pay this most useful of his employes--and pay it as a
debt, and not a gratuity. The probability is that he will find that
the sum justifies her in regarding herself as a partner in his craft
or profession, with a fair amount of working-capital.

There is but one equitable and comfortable way of relieving the
husband from the charge and the fact of injustice, and the wife from
the sorer burden of conscious pauperism. She ought to have a stated
allowance for household expenses, to be disbursed by herself and, if
he will it, to be accounted for to the master of the house, and a
smaller, but sure sum which is paid to her as her very own, which she
may appropriate as she likes. He should no more "give" her money,
than he makes a present of his weekly wages to the porter who sweeps
his store, or to the superintendent of his factory. The feeling that
their gloves, gowns, underclothing--everything that they wear, and the
very bread that keeps life in their bodies, are gifts of grace from
the husbands they serve in love and honor, has worn hundreds of
spirited women into their graves, and made venal hypocrites of
thousands. The double-eagle laid in the palm of the woman whose home
duties leave her no time for money-making, burns sometimes more hotly
than the penny given to her who, for the first time, begs at the
street-corner to keep herself from starving.

The strangest of anomalies that have birth in a condition of affairs
which e