ively high point. The head of the
middle-class household has been reduced by economic circumstances to
turn his hand to gaining a livelihood by occupations which often partake
largely of the character of industry, as in the case of the ordinary
business man of today. But the derivative fact-the vicarious leisure
and consumption rendered by the wife, and the auxiliary vicarious
performance of leisure by menials-remains in vogue as a conventionality
which the demands of reputability will not suffer to be slighted. It is
by no means an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work
with the utmost assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form render
for him that degree of vicarious leisure which the common sense of the
time demands.

The leisure rendered by the wife in such cases is, of course, not a
simple manifestation of idleness or indolence. It almost invariably
occurs disguised under some form of work or household duties or social
amenities, which prove on analysis to serve little or no ulterior end
beyond showing that she does not occupy herself with anything that is
gainful or that is of substantial use. As has already been noticed under
the head of manners, the greater part of the customary round of domestic
cares to which the middle-class housewife gives her time and effort is
of this character. Not that the results of her attention to household
matters, of a decorative and mundificatory character, are not pleasing
to the sense of men trained in 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 achie