the hands in a serious way.  With hard wood floors, bright gas-stoves, porcelain lined dishes, no pots and kettles, all the stairs, halls, etc., cared for by the janitor, the work is of a far less smutting kind than in the suburban house, where there is still need for much cleaning up of a roughening sort which cannot be escaped.  This has more to do than we are apt to think with the distaste for the country, unless several servants are kept, some for this work only.  In the old type of city house the travel up-and down-stairs to answer bell and telephone has demanded strength of back not possessed by the modern maid.  The house is not yet adapted to the new demands of the workers, and they shun it.  The mistress herself finds it beyond her strength, even if the traces of rough work were not quite so distasteful to her.

Miss Pettengill in her story of domestic service brings out the great part played by sooty dust, sifting in even through closed windows, in the burden of the waitress who is expected to keep the dining-room immaculate.

This is only one instance where the blame really belongs on the actual material house rather than on the mistress, except that she does not discover a remedy, does not even know where to look for the cause.  I have great faith in the business woman, who does see much that is better done and who will bring it back into the home.

Fashions in philanthropy do not yet tend in the direction of house betterment.

“A busy man cannot stop his life-work to teach architects what they ought to know,” says Wells; but on the other hand “we cannot be expected to teach men and their wives, as well as draw plans for them,” says the architect who has tried it.

The centrifugal forces that our social prophets are so fond of invoking, holding that the words “town” and “city” may become as obsolete as “mail-coach,” will have to reckon with these features of country life.

It is assumed that the work of women is “housekeeping.”  I should like to put the question suddenly to a thousand men.  What is twentieth-century housekeeping?  I venture the guess that less than a hundred would take into account the utter difference in their wives’ duties from their mothers’, as they remember them; and yet the house, even the flat, is built more or less along the old lines.  The women do not know enough to assert themselves, and have not the skill to show the builder what is wrong.  The architects could tell tales if they would.  The utter ignorance of what a house means, of the steps necessary to make a successful livable place, is appalling.  The young man who has $3000 as a legacy feels he can build.  His wife chooses the location near her friends whose houses she likes, and the architect is called in.  Do you wish back stairs?  Are you to keep three servants or none?  Do you wish the rooms separate or connecting?  All such questions find a blank stare.  “What difference does