ty, and came near being
elected.

The wives of these householders wear good clothes and have a liking for
a reasonable gayety, but very few of them can pretend to what is vaguely
called social standing, and, to do them justice, not many of them waste
any time lamenting it. They have, taking one with another, about three
children apiece, and are good mothers. A few of them belong to women's
clubs or flirt with the suffragettes, but the majority can get all of
the intellectual stimulation they crave in the Ladies' Home Journal and
the Saturday Evening Post, with Vogue added for its fashions. Most of
them, deep down in their hearts, suspect their husbands of secret
frivolity, and about ten per cent. have the proofs, but it is rare for
them to make rows about it, and the divorce rate among them is thus very
low. Themselves indifferent cooks, they are unable to teach their
servants the art, and so the food they set before their husbands and
children is often such as would make a Frenchman cut his throat. But
they are diligent housewives otherwise; they see to it that the windows
are washed, that no one tracks mud into the hall, that the servants do
not waste coal, sugar, soap and gas, and that the family buttons are
always sewed on. In religion these estimable wives are pious in habit
but somewhat nebulous in faith. That is to say, they regard any person
who specifically refuses to go to church as a heathen, but they
themselves are by no means regular in attendance, and not one in ten of
them could tell you whether transubstantiation is a Roman Catholic or a
Dunkard doctrine. About two per cent. have dallied more or less gingerly
with Christian Science, their average period of belief being one year.

The church we are in is like the neighborhood and its people: well-to-do
but not fashionable. It is Protestant in faith and probably
Episcopalian. The pews are of thick, yellow-brown oak, severe in pattern
and hideous in color. In each there is a long, removable cushion of a
dark, purplish, dirty hue, with here and there some of its hair stuffing
showing. The stained-glass windows, which were all bought ready-made and
depict scenes from the New Testament, commemorate the virtues of
departed worthies of the neighborhood, whose names appear, in illegible
black letters, in the lower panels. The floor is covered with a carpet
of some tough, fibrous material, apparently a sort of grass, and along
the center aisle it is much worn. Th