The Facts In Two Cases

[Copyright by American Press Association.] They were as far apart in education md social station -as if they hadbelonged to different races and had lived in diEerent hemispheres. They were as near akin in circurnstances and in suffering as if they had been twin sisters, and brought up under the same roof. The huband of one wrote "Honorable" before his name and reckoned his dollars by the million. He was, moreover, a man of imposing deportment, Dland in manner and órnate in language. Aj3 richea increased he set his heart apon them and upon the good things that riches buy. He had fonr children, and he erected ("bnilt" was too small a word) a palatial house in a fashionable street. Each child had a suite of three rooms. Each apartment was elaborately rated and furnished. The drawing rooms were crowded with bric-a-brac and monnments of upholsterly ingenuity. It was a work of art and perü to dust them every day. He developed a taste for entertaining as time went on and honors thickened upon Hm, and he mistook, like most of his guild, ostentation for hospitality. Every dish at the banquets for which he became famous was a show piece. He swelled with honest pride in the perusal of a popular personal paragraph estimating the value of his solver and ent glass at $50,000. The superintendent, part owner, and the slave of all this magnificence was his wif e. She was her own housekeeper, and employed besides the coachmanl whose business was in the stables and upon his box, three servan ts. There were twenty-five rooms in the palatial house.giving to each woman servant eight to be kept in the spick-and-span array demanded 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 Bridget. Even more as a matter of course the nominal mistress supplemented the deficiënties of her aids The house was as present and forcefal 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 in the hedges were all Doras to a bud." No snail ever carried her abode upon her back more constant! y than our poor rich woman the satin lined, hot aired and píate 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 HODSE AND IIOUSEKEEPING. ■ When she drove abroad in her lururious chariot, behind high stepping bays, jingling with plated harness, or repaired in the season to seashore or mountain, she was striviug 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 t! t 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 century and ourlanl! Our honorable's consort never left it until she was borne f orth into the securer i refuge of the narrow house that needed ' none of her caretaking. 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 second "case" is that of a farmer's wife, born and bred arnong the hills beyond the shelter of which she had traveled but once, and that on her wedding journey. She carne back f rom the blief outing to take possession of her own house - prideful phrase to every young niatron. It was an eight roomed farmstead, with no modern conveniences. That meant that all the water used in kitchen and dweiling had to be fetched from a well twenty f eet away; that there was no drain or sink or f urnace; that stationary tubs had not been heard of, and the washing was wrung by hand. The stalwart farmer "calculated to live" in haying, harvesting, planting, plowing, thrashing and killing times. Whatever might have been the wife's calculations, she toiled unaided, cooking, washing, ironing, scrubbing, sewing, churning, butter making and "bringing up a family," single handed, with never a creature to lift an ounce or do a stroke for her while she could stand upon her feet. When she was laid upon her back - an unusual occurrence except when there was a fresh baby - a neighbor looked in twice a day to lend a hand, or Mrs. Ganip was engaged for a fortnight. It was not an unusual occurrence for the nominally convalescent inother to get dinner for six "men folks" with a 8weeks-old baby upon her left arm. Her husband was energetic and "forehanded," and without the slightest approach to iutentional cruelty looked to his wife to "keep up her end of the log." He tolerated no wastefulness, and expected to be well fed and corufortable; and comfort with his Yankee mother's 1 i son implied tidiness. To meet his views, as well as to satisfy her own conscienca, his partner became a model manager, woman of "faculty." I saw her last year in the incurable ward of a madhouse. From sunrise unti2 2ark, except when forced to take her meáis, she stood at one window and polished one pane with her apron, a plait like a trench between her puckered brows, her rnouth pursed into an anguished knot, her hollow eyes drearily anxious - the saddest picture I ever beheld, most awfully sad because she was j the type of a class. Some men - and they are not all ignorant men - are beginning to be alarmed at the press of women into other - I had almost said any other - avenues of labor than that of housewifery. Eagerness to break up housekeeping and try boarding for a while, in order to get rested out, is ! not confined to the incompetent and the indolent. Nor is it altogether tho result of the national discontent with "the j greatest plague of life" - servants. American women from high to low keep house too hard because too amhitiously. It is, furthermore, ambition without knowledge; henee misdirected. We have the most indifferent domestic service in the world, but we employ as a rule too fow servants, such as they are. It is considered altogether sensible and becoming for the mechanie's wif e to do her own house work as 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 6he I calis in a charwoman on certain days, and is content to live as becomes the station of a house wife who n. Jrt be her own domestic staS. Here is the root of the difïerence. In a climate that keeps the pulses in full leap and the nerves tense we cali 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. Ha ving created f alse etandards of respectability we crowd insane asylums and cemeteries in trying to live up to thein. The tradesman who begins to acknowledge the probability that he wül become a rich citizen, and whose wife has feelings on the subject of living as her neighbors do, takes the conveutional 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, aecording to the English acceptance of the ' word. Silks and nioquette harmonize as well as calicó and ingrain once did. A threestory-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 Americaii progress. As flat a denial would be the endeavor to live without what an old lady once described to ine as a "pair of parlors." The stereo typed brace are senseless and ugly, but one of the necessaries of life to our arnbitious housewife. She would scout as vulgar the homely cheerf ulness of the rnidJle class Engliáiiman's single "parlor," where tne tuble is spread and the faniily receives visitors. Having saJdled hiinself wilh a house too big for his family, and stocked the show rooms with plushings so fine that the family are afraii to use them unlesa wheu there iscoinpany, tae prudent citizen satisfies the econoinic side of him by making meniais of wife and daughters, without thought of the oppojing circurnstance that he has pracucally indorsed their intention to make Lme lalies of themselves. Neither he nor the chief slave of her own gentility, the wife, who will maintain her reputation for "faculty" or perish in the attempt, has a suspicion that the strain to make meet the ends of frugality and pretensión is ; pably and criminally absurd. By keeping up a certain appearance of aifluence and fashion they assume tue obligation to employ servauts enough to carry out the design, yet in nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of every thousand they ignore tho duty. I adniit without deuiur that as Amer ican domestics go they are a bur Jen, ai. expense and a vexation. Notwjiastand ing all these drawbacks, sne who wil; not risk them should not live in such ■ way that she must make use of such instrumenta or over work herself physically and meutally. The entire social and domescic system of American communities calis loudly for the reform of simpiioity and congruity. We begin to build and are not able to finish. Our economics are false and mischievous, our airns are peLty and meretricious. The web of our daily living is not round and even threaded. The homes which are constructed upon the foundations of deranged, dying and dead women are a mockery of the holy name. Our houses shouid be planned and kept for those who are to live in them, not for those who tarry withit,the doors for a night or an hour. W hen housekeeping becomes an in toleradle care there is sin somewhere and danger everywhere.