her development.  Housekeeping is only the shell of a Woman’s Business.  Women lose themselves in it as men lose themselves in shopkeeping, farming, editing.  Knowing nothing but your work is one of the commonest human mistakes.  Pitifully enough it is often a deliberate mistake—­the only way or the easiest way one finds to quiet an unsatisfied heart.  The undue place given good housekeeping in many a woman’s scheme of life is the more tragic because it is a distortion of one of the finest things in the human experience—­the satisfaction of doing a thing well.  It is a satisfaction which the worker must have if he is to get joy from his labor.  But labor is not for the sake of itself.  It must have its human reason.  You rejoice in a “deep-driven plow”—­but if there was to be no harvest, your straight, full furrows would be little comfort.  You rejoice to build a stanch and beautiful house, but if you knew it was to stand forever vacant, joy would go from your task.  An end work must have.  One does not keep house for its own sake.  It is absorption in the process—­the refusal to allow it to be forgotten or utilized freely, that makes the work barren.  It is like becoming so absorbed in a beautiful frame that you are unconscious of the picture—­unconscious that there is a picture.  Things must serve their purpose if they are to convince of their beauty.  Try living in a room with a wonderfully fitted fireplace; its mantel of exquisite design and workmanship, its fire irons masterpieces of art—­and no heat from it!  Note how utterly distasteful it all becomes.  It is no longer beautiful because it does not do the work it was made beautiful to do.

One of the most repellent houses in which I have ever visited was one in which there was, from garret to cellar, so far as I discovered, not one article which was not of the period imitated, not one streak of color which was not “right.”  It was a masterpiece of correct furnishing, but it gave one a curious sense of limitation.  One could not escape the scheme.  The inelasticity of it hampered sociability—­and there grew on one, too, a sense of unfitness.  His clothes were an anachronism!  They were the only thing which did not belong!

There is an old-fashioned adjective which describes better than any other this preoccupation with things, which so often prevents a woman’s coming to an understanding of the heart of her Business.  It is old maidish.  It has often been the pathetic fate of single women to live alone.  To minister to themselves becomes their occupation.  The force of their natures turns to their belongings.  If in straitened circumstances they give their souls to spotless floors; if rich, to flawless mahogany and china, to perfect household machinery.  Wherever you find in woman this perversion—­old maidish is perhaps the most accurate word for her—­it is a sacrifice of the human to the material.  A house without sweet human litter, without the trace of many varying tastes and occupations, without the trail of friends who perhaps have no sense of beauty but who love to give, without the scars of use, and the dust of running feet—­what is it but a meatless shell!