Peace and good will may go with disorder and carelessness! They may
fly order and thrift. They will fly them when order and thrift are
held as the more desirable. A woman is often slow to learn that good
housekeeping alone cannot produce a milieu in which family happiness
thrives and to which people naturally gravitate. She looks at it as
the fulfillment of the law--the end of her Business. It is the
exaggerated place she gives it in the scheme of things, which brings
disaster to her happiness and gives substance to the argument that
woman's lot in life is fatal to her development. Housekeeping is only
the shell of a Woman's Business. Women lose themselves in it as men
lose themselves in shopkeeping, farming, editing. Knowing nothing but
your work is one of the commonest human mistakes. Pitifully enough it
is often a deliberate mistake--the only way or the easiest way one
finds to quiet an unsatisfied heart. The undue place given good
housekeeping in many a woman's scheme of life is the more tragic
because it is a distortion of one of the finest things in the human
experience--the satisfaction of doing a thing well. It is a
satisfaction which the worker must have if he is to get joy from his
labor. But labor is not for the sake of itself. It must have its human
reason. You rejoice in a "deep-driven plow"--but if there was to be no
harvest, your straight, full furrows would be little comfort. You
rejoice to build a stanch and beautiful house, but if you knew it was
to stand forever vacant, joy would go from your task. An end work must
have. One does not keep house for its own sake. It is absorption in
the process--the refusal to allow it to be forgotten or utilized
freely, that makes the work barren. It is like becoming so absorbed in
a beautiful frame that you are unconscious of the picture--unconscious
that there is a picture. Things must serve their purpose if they are
to convince of their beauty. Try living in a room with a wonderfully
fitted fireplace; its mantel of exquisite design and workmanship, its
fire irons masterpieces of art--and no heat from it! Note how utterly
distasteful it all becomes. It is no longer beautiful because it does
not do the work it was made beautiful to do.

One of the most repellent houses in which I have ever visited was one
in which there was, from garret to cellar, so far as I discovered, not
one article which was not of the period imitated, not one streak of
color which was not "