by the master's position and taste. As a matter of course something
was neglected in every department, the instinct of self-preservation
being innate and cultivated in Abigail, Phyllis and Gretchen, "Jeems"
and "Chawls." Even more as a matter of course, the nominal mistress
supplemented the deficiencies of her aids.

The house was as present and forceful a consciousness with her as his
Dulcinea with David Copperfield at the period when the "sun shone
Dora, and the birds sang Dora, and the south wind blew Dora, and the
wild flowers were all Doras to a bud." No snail ever carried her abode
upon her back more constantly than our poor rich woman the
satin-lined, hot-aired and plate-windowed stone pile, with her. The
lines that criss-crossed her forehead, and channeled her cheeks, and
ran downward from the corners of her mouth, were hieroglyphics
standing in the eyes of the initiated for the baleful legend--

"HOUSE AND HOUSEKEEPING."

When she drove abroad in her luxurious chariot, behind high-stepping
bays, jingling with plated harness, or repaired in the season to
seashore or mountain, she was striving feebly to push away the tons of
splendid responsibility from her brain.

One day she gave over the futile attempt. Something crashed down upon
and all around her, and everything except inconceivable misery of soul
was a blank.

Expensive doctors diagnosed her case as nervous prostration. When she
vanished from the eyes of her public, and a high-salaried housekeeper,
a butler, a nursery governess and an extra Abigail took her place and
did half her work in the satin-lined shell out of which she had crept,
maimed and well-nigh murdered, it was announced that she was "under
the care of a specialist at a retreat."

A retreat! Heaven save and pardon us for making such homes part and
parcel and a necessity of our century and our land!

Our Rich Man's Wife never left it until she was borne forth into the
securer refuge of the narrow house that needed none of her
care-taking. Upon the low green thatch lies heavily the shadow of a
mighty monument that, to the satirist's eye, has a family likeness to
the stone pile which killed her.

The Farmer's Wife was born and bred among the prairies, out of sight
of which she had traveled but once, and that on her wedding journey.
She came back from the brief outing to take possession of "her own
house"--prideful phrase to every young matron.

It was an eight-roomed farmstead, with n