As the months wear on, Mary learns, if her spouse does not, that white
muslin comes to grief so speedily in the course of even light
housework, as to swell the laundry bills inordinately. The embroidered
tea-gowns in which she used to array herself upon the rare occasions
of her betrothed's morning calls, gather dust streaks upon skirts and
the under sides of the sleeves, and, watch as she may, catch spots in
the kitchen. She considers,--being lovingly determined to help, not
hinder her mate,--that his purse must purchase new garments when her
trousseau is worn out, and she saves her best clothes for "occasions."
John, being her husband, is no longer an occasion. Dark prints and
ginghams, simply made, and freshened up at meal-times by full white
aprons, are serviceable, sensible, economical and significant of our
dear Mary's practical wisdom. They are by so many degrees less
becoming to her than the dainty apparel of loverly memory, that we do
not wonder at the surprised discontent of the young husband.

Marriage has made no distinct change in his apparel. In his business a
man must be decent, or he loses credit. In masculine ignorance of the
immutable law that in dislodging dirt some must cling to the garments
and person of the toiler, he sets down his wife's altered appearance
to indifference to his happiness. She may have labored from an early
breakfast to a late dinner to make his home comfortable and tasteful;
into each of the dishes served up with secret pride for his
consumption, may have gone a wealth of love and earnest desire that
would have set up ten poets in sonnets and madrigals. Because her
hands are roughened and her complexion muddied by her work, and--in
the knowledge that dishes are to be washed and the table re-set for
breakfast, and the kitchen cleared up after he has been regaled--she
has slipped on a dark frock in which she was wont to receive him on