le, too few servants, such as they are. It is
considered altogether sensible and becoming for the mechanic's wife to
do her own housework as a bride and as a matron of years. Unless her
husband prospers rapidly she is accounted "shiftless" should she hire
a washerwoman, while to "keep a girl" is extravagance, or a
significant stride toward gentility. The wife of the English joiner or
mason or small farmer, if brisk, notable and healthy, may dispense
with the stated service of a maid of all work, but she calls in a
charwoman on certain days, and is content to live as becomes the
station of a housewife who must be her own domestic staff.

Here is the root of the difference. In a climate that keeps the pulses
in full leap and the nerves tense, we call upon pride to lash on the
quivering body and spirit to run the unrighteous race, the goal of
which is to seem richer than we are, and make "smartness" (American
smartness) cover the want of capital. Having created false standards
of respectability, we crowd insane asylums and cemeteries in trying to
live up to them.

The tradesman who begins to acknowledge the probability that he will
become a rich citizen, and whose wife has "feelings" on the subject of
living as her neighbors do, takes the conventional step toward
asserting himself and gratifying her aspirations by moving into a
bigger house than that which has satisfied him up to now, and
furnishing it well--that is, smartly, according to the English
acceptance of the word.

Silks and moquette harmonize as well as calico and ingrain once did. A
three-story-and-a-half-with-a-high-stoop house, without a piano in the
back parlor, and a long mirror between the front parlor windows, would
be a forlorn contradiction of the genius of American progress. As flat
a denial would be the endeavor to live without what an old lady once
described to me as, a "pair of parlors." The stereotyped brace is
senseless and ugly, but one of the necessaries of life to our
ambitious housewife. She would scout as vulgar the homely cheerfulness
of the middle-class Englishman's single "parlor" where the table is
spread and the family receives visitors. Having saddled himself with a
house too big for his family, and stocked the showrooms with
plenishings so fine that the family are afraid to use them unless when
there is company, the prudent citizen satisfies the economic side of
him by making menials of wife and daughters without thought of the
opp