some must cling to the garments
and person of the toiler, he sets down his wife's altered appearance
to indifference to his happiness. She may have labored from an early
breakfast to a late dinner to make his home comfortable and tasteful;
into each of the dishes served up with secret pride for his
consumption, may have gone a wealth of love and earnest desire that
would have set up ten poets in sonnets and madrigals. Because her
hands are roughened and her complexion muddied by her work, and--in
the knowledge that dishes are to be washed and the table re-set for
breakfast, and the kitchen cleared up after he has been regaled--she
has slipped on a dark frock in which she was wont to receive him on
rainy evenings--he falls into a brown and cynical study, which
dishonors his wife only a little more than it disgraces himself and
human nature. "Time was"--so runs his musing--"when she thought it
worth her while to take pains to look pretty. That was when there was
still a chance of a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip. She has me fast
now, and anything is good enough for a husband."

Not one syllable of this chapter is penned for the woman who deserves
an iota of censure like the above. It is a wife's duty to study to
look well in her husband's eyes, always and in all circumstances. Her
person should be scrupulously clean, her hair becomingly arranged, her
working-gown as neat as she can keep it, and relieved before John
comes in by clean collar or ruching and a smooth white apron. It is
altogether possible for the woman who "does her own work" to be as
"well set-up"--to borrow a sporting phrase from John--as her rich
neighbor who can drag a train over Oriental rugs from the moment she
rises to a late breakfast until she sweeps yards of brocade and velvet
up the polished stairs after ball, dinner or theatre-party.

What I have to do with now is John's unreasonable desire that his wife
should--as the help-meet of a man who has his own way to make in the
world--dress as well as when she was the unmarried daughter of an
elderly gentleman whose way was made. Every sensible girl married to a
poor man comprehends, as one trait of wifely duty, that she must make
her trousseau last and look well as long as she can. In the honorable
dread of suggesting to him whose fortune she has elected to share, that
when her handsome gowns are no longer wearable she must replace lace
with cotton lawns, and silk with all-wool merino or serge, she d