There is but one equitable and comfortable way of relieving the husband from the charge and the fact of injustice, and the wife from the sorer burden of conscious pauperism.  She ought to have a stated allowance for household expenses, to be disbursed by herself and, if he will it, to be accounted for to the master of the house, and a smaller, but sure sum which is paid to her as her very own, which she may appropriate as she likes.  He should no more “give” her money, than he makes a present of his weekly wages to the porter who sweeps his store, or to the superintendent of his factory.  The feeling that their gloves, gowns, underclothing—­everything that they wear, and the very bread that keeps life in their bodies, are gifts of grace from the husbands they serve in love and honor, has worn hundreds of spirited women into their graves, and made venal hypocrites of thousands.  The double-eagle laid in the palm of the woman whose home duties leave her no time for money-making, burns sometimes more hotly than the penny given to her who, for the first time, begs at the street-corner to keep herself from starving.

The strangest of anomalies that have birth in a condition of affairs which everybody has come to regard as altogether right and becoming, is that the wife whose handsome wedding portion has been absorbed by her husband’s business is as dependent upon his favor for her “keep” as she who brought no dot.  She does not even draw interest upon the money invested.  Is it to be wondered at that caustic critics of human nature and inconsistencies catalogue marriage for the wife under the head of mendicancy?  Would it not be phenomenal if women with eyes, and with brains behind the eyes, did not gird at the necessity of suing humbly for really what belongs to them?

I have known two, or at most three women, who averred that they “did not mind asking their husbands for money.”  Out of simple charity I preferred to believe that they were untruthful, to discounting their disrespect and delicacy to the extent implied by the assertion.  Yet the street beggar gets used to plying his trade, and I may have been mistaken.

Let us not overlook another side of the question under perplexed debate.  The woman who considers herself defrauded by present privations and what seem to her needless economies, loses sight, sometimes, of what John keeps before him as the load-star of his existence and endeavor; to wit, that toil and economy are for the common weal.  He is not a miser for his individual enrichment, nor does he plan with deliberate design for the shadowy second wife.  It is not to be denied that No. 2 often lives like a queen upon the wealth which No. 1 helped to accumulate, and killed herself in so doing.  But John does not look so far as this.  Much scrimping and hoarding may engender a baser love of money for money’s self.  In the outset of the task, and usually for all time, he means that wife and children shall have the full