I doubt if there is any problem in the Woman’s Business which requires a higher grade of intelligence, and certainly none that requires broader sympathies, than this of giving to her home that quality of stimulation and joyousness which makes young and old seek it gladly and freely.

To do this requires money, freedom, time, and strength?  No, what I mean does not depend upon these things.  It is the notion that it does that often prevents its growth.  For it is a spirit, an attitude of mind, and not a formula or a piece of machinery.  As far as my observation goes it is quite, if not more likely, to be found in a three-room apartment, where a family is living on fifteen dollars a week, as in an East Central Park mansion!  In these little families where love prevails—­it usually does exist.  It is the kind of an atmosphere in which a man prefers to smoke his pipe rather than go to the saloon; where the girl brings her young man home rather than walk with him.  Mutual interest and affection is its note.  Such homes do exist by the tens of thousands; even in New York City.  It is not from them that girls go to brothels or boys to the Tombs.

Externally, these homes are often pretty bad to look at—­overcrowded, disorderly, and noisy.  Cleanliness, order, and space are good things, but it is a mistake to think that there is no virtue without them.  There are more primary and essential things; things to which they should be added, but without which they are lifeless virtues.  In one of Miss Loane’s reports on the life of the English poor, she makes these truthful observations:—­

One learns to understand how it is that the dirty, untidy young wife, who, when her husband returns hungry and tired from a long day’s work, holds up a smilingly assured face to be kissed, exclaiming, “Gracious! if I hadn’t forgot all about your tea!” and clatters together an extravagant and ill-chosen meal while she pours out a stream of cheerful and inconsequent chatter, is more loved, and dealt with more patiently, tenderly, and faithfully, than her clean and frugal neighbor, who has prepared a meal that ought to turn the author of Twenty Satisfying Suppers for Sixpence green with envy, but who expects her husband to be eternally grateful because “he could eat his dinner off the boards,”—­when all that the poor man asks is to be allowed to walk over them unreproached.

Peace and good will may go with disorder and carelessness!  They may fly order and thrift.  They will fly them when order and thrift are held as the more desirable.  A woman is often slow to learn that good housekeeping alone cannot produce a milieu in which family happiness thrives and to which people naturally gravitate.  She looks at it as the fulfillment of the law—­the end of her Business.  It is the exaggerated place she gives it in the scheme of things, which brings disaster to her happiness and gives substance to the argument that woman’s lot in life is fatal to