and confounds these separate functions, is of necessity imperfect and
wrong. We have nothing whatever to say against the professional
self-support of women who have no men to work for them, and who must
therefore work for themselves in order to live. In what direction soever
they can best make their way, let them take it. Brains and intellectual
gifts are of no sex and no condition, and it is far more important that
good work should be done than that it should be done by this or that
particular set of workers.

But we are speaking of the home duties of married women, and of those
girls who have no need to earn their daily bread, and who are not so
specially gifted as to be driven afield by the irrepressible power of
genius. We are speaking of women who cannot help in the family income,
but who can both save and improve in the home; women whose lives now are
one long day of idleness, _ennui_, and vagrant imagination, because they
despise the activities into which they were born, while seeking outlets
for their energies impossible to them both by nature and social
restrictions.

It is strange to see into what unreasonable disrepute active
housekeeping--woman's first natural duty--has fallen in England. Take a
family with four or five hundred a year--and we know how small a sum
that is for "genteel humanity" in these days--the wife who will be an
active housekeeper, even with such an income, will be an exception to
the rule; and the daughters who will be anything more than drawing-room
dolls waiting for husbands to transfer them to a home of their own,
where they may be as useless as they are now, will be rarer still. For
things are getting worse, not better, and our young women are less
useful even than their mothers; while these last do not, as a rule, come
near the good housekeeping ladies of olden times, who knew every secret
of domestic economy, and made a point of honor of a wise and pleasant
"distribution of bread."

The usual method of London housekeeping, even in the second ranks of the
middle-classes, is for the mistress to give her orders in the kitchen in
the morning, leaving the cook to pass them on to the tradespeople when
they call. If she is not very indolent, and if she has a due regard for
neatness and cleanliness, she may supplement her kitchen commands by
going up stairs through some of the bedrooms; but after a kind word of
advice to the housemaid if she is sweet-tempered, or a harsh word of
censur