ican women than to the
old-time Japanese lady portrayed in these pages. She rises every morning
at five, attends to every detail of her housekeeping, watches carefully
and with educated common sense over her family of young children,
believes in good food, fresh air, and exercise, for boys and girls
alike, and is a helpful friend and good neighbor, filling to the full
the position of work and influence in which she is placed. Her husband
is a successful business man, whom frequent journeys across the Pacific
have made thoroughly cosmopolitan, and their children are accustomed to
a freedom from conventional restraints and a healthful diet and regimen
such as old Japan never knew.

Last year the plan of spending the summer with the husband's relatives,
which had been long projected, was actually carried out, and the whole
family migrated to the provincial city from which the husband had
sprung. The aged mother, a gentlewoman of the old type, was delighted to
meet and entertain her daughter-in-law and grandchildren, and did her
best, with all old-fashioned courtesy, to make the visit a pleasant one.
The house was clean and spacious, the mats soft and white, the bows of
the lowest, the voices and speech the politest that Japan could furnish,
but the healthy, restless children found the conventional restraints
irksome, and the old-fashioned diet of rice and pickles, with hardly a
variation from morning till night and from week to week, was quite
different from the bountiful table to which they had been accustomed.
The younger woman could not criticise her mother-in-law's arrangements,
neither could she bear to see her children growing thin and pale before
her eyes. She consulted her husband, who, in accordance with the antique
ideas of propriety, was served his meals at a different time and in a
different room from his wife and family. To his food his mother had
always added various delicacies which her old-time Spartan spirit would
not allow her to set before her daughter-in-law and grandchildren. It
would have been quite contrary to her ideas of rank and etiquette for
her to make any modification of her ordinary fare for them. As the son
was already supplying the funds for carrying on his mother's
establishment, it occurred to him that he might increase her allowance
on the plea that her summer expenses must be heavy with so large an
addition to her household. But the old lady was sure that nothing more
was necessary, and