Austen
says is, if not good, the best: the society of gifted, cultivated,
travelled, experienced, high-principled people, capable of respecting
themselves and respecting their qualities wherever they find them in
others. These ladies do not pretend to 'entertain,' but their table is
such that they are never afraid to ask a friend to it. In a moment, if
there is not enough or not good enough, one of them conjures something
attractive out of the kitchen, and you sit down to a banquet. The
sisters are both of that gentle class of semi-invalids whose presence
in our civilization enables us to support the rudeness of the general
health. They employ aesthetically the beautiful alleviations with which
science has rescued domestic drudgery from so much of the primal curse;
it is a pleasure to see them work; it is made so graceful, so charming,
that you can hardly forbear taking hold yourself."

"But you do forbear," we interposed; "and do you imagine that their
example is going to prevail with the great average of impecunious
American housewives, or sisters, or daughters?"

"No, they will continue to 'keep a girl' whom they will enslave to the
performance of duties which they would be so much better for doing
themselves, both in body and mind, for that doing would develop in them
the hospitable soul of those two dear ladies. They will be in terror of
the casual guest, knowing well that they cannot set before him things
fit to eat. They have no genius for housekeeping, which is one with
home-making: they do not love it, and those ladies do love it in every
detail, so that their simple flat shines throughout with a lustre which
pervades the kitchen and the parlor and the chamber alike. It is the
one-girl household, or the two-girl, which makes living costly because
it makes living wasteful; it is not the luxurious establishments of the
rich which are to blame for our banishment to the mythical cheapness of
Europe."

We were not convinced by the eloquence which had overheated our friend,
and we objected: "But those ladies you speak of give their whole lives
to housekeeping, and ought cheapness to be achieved at such an expense?"

"In the first place, they don't; and, if they do, what do the one-girl
or the two-girl housekeepers give their lives to? or, for the matter of
that, the ten or twenty girl housekeepers? The ladies of whom I speak
have always read the latest book worth reading; they have seen the
picture which people w