cuisine was probably a fearful thing, indeed. But today the flattery
turns into a sort of libel, and she resents it, or, at all events, does not
welcome it. I used to know an American literary man, educated on
the Continent, who married a woman because she had exceptional
gifts in this department. Years later, at one of her dinners, a friend
of her husband's tried to please her by mentioning the fact, to which
be had always been privy. But instead of being complimented, as a
man might have been if told that his wife had married him because
be was a good lawyer, or surgeon, or blacksmith, this unusual
housekeeper, suffering a renaissance of usualness, denounced the
guest as a liar, ordered him out of the house, and threatened to leave
her husband.


This disdain of offices that, after all, are necessary, and might as
well be faced with some show of cheerfulness, takes on the
character of a definite cult in the United States, and the stray
woman who attends to them faithfully is laughed at as a drudge and
a fool, just as she is apt to be dismissed as a "brood sow" (I quote
literally, craving absolution for the phrase: a jury of men during the
late war, on very thin patriotic grounds, jailed the author of it) if she
favours her lord with viable issue. One result is the notorious
villainousness of American cookery--a villainousness so painful to a
cultured uvula that a French hack-driver, if his wife set its
masterpieces before him, would brain her with his linoleum hat. To
encounter a decent meal in an American home of the middle class,
simple, sensibly chosen and competently cooked, becomes almost as
startling as to meet a Y. M.C. A. secretary in a bordello, and a good
deal rarer. Such a thing, in most of the large cities of the Republic,
scarcely has any existence. If the average American husband wants