very bread that keeps life in their bodies, are gifts of grace from
the husbands they serve in love and honor, has worn hundreds of
spirited women into their graves, and made venal hypocrites of
thousands. The double-eagle laid in the palm of the woman whose home
duties leave her no time for money-making, burns sometimes more hotly
than the penny given to her who, for the first time, begs at the
street-corner to keep herself from starving.

The strangest of anomalies that have birth in a condition of affairs
which everybody has come to regard as altogether right and becoming,
is that the wife whose handsome wedding portion has been absorbed by
her husband's business is as dependent upon his favor for her "keep"
as she who brought no dot. She does not even draw interest upon the
money invested. Is it to be wondered at that caustic critics of human
nature and inconsistencies catalogue marriage for the wife under the
head of mendicancy? Would it not be phenomenal if women with eyes, and
with brains behind the eyes, did not gird at the necessity of suing
humbly for really what belongs to them?

I have known two, or at most three women, who averred that they "did
not mind asking their husbands for money." Out of simple charity I
preferred to believe that they were untruthful, to discounting their
disrespect and delicacy to the extent implied by the assertion. Yet
the street beggar gets used to plying his trade, and I may have been
mistaken.

Let us not overlook another side of the question under perplexed
debate. The woman who considers herself defrauded by present
privations and what seem to her needless economies, loses sight,
sometimes, of what John keeps before him as the load-star of his