r,
and dropping with fatigue. His wife, who has done nothing to weary her,
is equally enraged to be taken away just as the ball was becoming
amusing. What a happy, united pair they are as the footman closes the
door and the carriage rolls off home! Who is to blame? The husband is
vainly trying to lead the most exacting of double lives, that of a
business man all day and a society man all night. You can pick him out
at a glance in a ballroom. His eye shows you that there is no rest for
him, for he has placed his wife at the head of an establishment whose
working crushes him into the mud of care and anxiety. Has he any one to
blame but himself?

In England, I am told, the man of a family goes up to London in the
spring and gets his complete outfit, down to the smallest details of hat-
box and umbrella. If there happens to be money left, the wife gets a new
gown or two: if not, she "turns" the old ones and rejoices vicariously in
the splendor of her "lord." I know one charming little home over there,
where the ladies cannot afford a pony-carriage, because the three
indispensable hunters eat up the where-withal.

Thackeray was delighted to find one household (Major Ponto's) where the
governess ruled supreme, and I feel a fiendish pleasure in these accounts
of a country where men have been able to maintain some rights, and am
moved to preach a crusade for the liberation of the American husband,
that the poor, down-trodden creature may revolt from the slavery where he
is held and once more claim his birthright. If he be prompt to act (and
is successful) he may work such a reform that our girls, on marrying, may
feel that some duties and responsibilities go with their new positions;
and a state of things be changed, where it is possible for a woman to be
pitied by her friends as a model of abnegation, because she has decided
to remain in town during the summer to keep her husband company and make
his weary home-coming brighter. Or where (as in a story recently heard)
a foreigner on being presented to an American bride abroad and asking for
her husband, could hear in answer: "Oh, he could not come; he was too
busy. I am making my wedding-trip without him."

No. 19--The Grand Prix

In most cities, it is impossible to say when the "season" ends. In
London and with us in New York it dwindles off without any special
finish, but in Paris it closes like a trap-door, or the curtain on the
last scene of a panto