middle-class proprieties; but the taste to which these effects of
household adornment and tidiness appeal is a taste which has been
formed under the selective guidance of a canon of propriety that
demands just these evidences of wasted effort. The effects are
pleasing to us chiefly because we have been taught to find them
pleasing. There goes into these domestic duties much solicitude
for a proper combination of form and color, and for other ends
that are to be classed as aesthetic in the proper sense of the
term; and it is not denied that effects having some substantial
aesthetic value are sometimes attained. Pretty much all that is
here insisted on is that, as regards these amenities of life, the
housewife's efforts are under the guidance of traditions that
have been shaped by the law of conspicuously wasteful expenditure
of time and substance. If beauty or comfort is achieved-and it is
a more or less fortuitous circumstance if they are-they must be
achieved by means and methods that commend themselves to the
great economic law of wasted effort. The more reputable,
"presentable" portion of middle-class household paraphernalia
are, on the one hand, items of conspicuous consumption, and on
the other hand, apparatus for putting in evidence the vicarious
leisure rendered by the housewife.

The requirement of vicarious consumption at the hands of the wife
continues in force even at a lower point in the pecuniary scale
than the requirement of vicarious leisure. At a point below which
little if any pretense of wasted effort, in ceremonial cleanness
and the like, is observable, and where there is
assuredly no conscious attempt at ostensible leisure, decency
still requires the wife to consume some goods conspicuously for
the reputability of the household and its head. So that, as the