Having settled these points as far as possible,—­the question of water-supply and ventilation being left to another chapter,—­it is to be remembered that the house is not merely a place to be made pleasant for one’s friends.  They form only a small portion of the daily life; and the first consideration should be:  Is it so planned that the necessary and inevitable work of the day can be accomplished with the least expenditure of force?  North and South, the kitchen is often the least-considered room of the house; and, so long as the necessary meals are served up, the difficulties that may have hedged about such serving are never counted.  At the South it is doubly so, and necessarily; old conditions having made much consideration of convenience for servants an unthought-of thing.  With a throng of unemployed women and children, the question could only be, how to secure some small portion of work for each one; and in such case, the greater the inconveniences, the more chance for such employment.  Water could well be half a mile distant, when a dozen little darkies had nothing to do but form a running line between house and spring; and so with wood and kindling and all household necessities.

To-day, with the old service done away with once for all, and with a set of new conditions governing every form of work, the Southern woman faces difficulties to which her Northern or Western sister is an utter stranger; faces them often with a patience and dignity beyond all praise, but still with a hopelessness of better things, the necessary fruit of ignorance.  Old things are passed away, and the new order is yet too unfamiliar for rules to have formulated and settled in any routine of action.  While there is, at the North, more intuitive and inherited sense of how things should be done, there is on many points an almost equal ignorance, more especially among the cultivated classes, who, more than at any period of woman’s history, are at the mercy of their servants.  Every science is learned but domestic science.  The schools ignore it; and, indeed, in the rush toward an early graduation, there is small room for it.

“She can learn at home,” say the mothers.  “She will take to it when her time comes, just as a duck takes to water,” add the fathers; and the matter is thus dismissed as settled.

In the mean time the “she” referred to—­the average daughter of average parents in both city and country—­neither “learns at home,” nor “takes to it naturally,” save in exceptional cases; and the reason for this is found in the love, which, like much of the love given, is really only a higher form of selfishness.  The busy mother of a family, who has fought her own way to fairly successful administration, longs to spare her daughters the petty cares, the anxious planning, that have helped to eat out her own youth; and so the young girl enters married life with a vague sense of the dinners that must be, and a general belief that somehow or other they come of themselves.  And so with all household labor.  That to perform it successfully and skillfully, demands not only training, but the best powers one can bring to bear upon its accomplishment, seldom enters the mind; and the student, who has ended her course of chemistry or physiology enthusiastically, never dreams of applying either to every-day life.