benefit of what he has heaped up in the confident belief that he knows who will gather with him.  Men take longer views in these matters than women.  To “draw money out of the business” is a form of speech to a majority of wives.  To him whose household expenses overrun what he considers the bounds of reason, this “drawing” means harder work and to less purpose for months to come; clipped wings of enterprise, and occasionally loss of credit.  He who has married a reasonably intelligent woman cannot make her comprehend this too soon.  If he can enlist her sympathies in his plans for earning independence and wealth, he has secured a valuable coadjutor.  If he can show her that he is investing certain moneys which are due to her in ways approved by her, which will augment her private fortune, he will retain her confidence with her respect.

Each of us likes to own something in his or her own right.  The custom and prejudice that, since the abolition of slavery, make wives the solitary exception to the rule that the “laborer is worthy of his hire,” are unworthy of a progressive age.  The idea that such having and holding will alienate a good woman from the husband who permits it, degrades the sex.  He whose manliness suffers by comparison with a level-headed, clear-eyed wife capable of keeping her own bank account, makes apparent what a mistake she made when she married him.

CHAPTER III.

THE PARABLE OF THE RICH WOMAN AND THE FARMER’S WIFE.

The rich woman was born and brought up in New York City; the farmer’s wife in Indiana.

They were as far apart in education and social station as if they had belonged to different races and had lived in different hemispheres.

They were as near akin in circumstances and in suffering as if they had been twin sisters, and brought up under the same roof.

The husband of one wrote “Honorable” before his name, and reckoned his dollars by the million.  He was, moreover, a man of imposing deportment, bland in manner and ornate in language.  As riches increased he set his heart upon them and upon the good things that riches buy.  He had four children, and he erected ("built” was too small a word) a palatial house in a fashionable street.

Each child had a suite of three rooms.  Each apartment was elaborately decorated and furnished.  The drawing-rooms were crowded with bric-a-brac and monuments of the upholsterer’s ingenuity.  It was a work of art and peril to dust them every day.  He developed a taste for entertaining as time went on and honors thickened upon him, and he mistook, like most of his guild, ostentation for hospitality.  Every dish at the banquets for which he became famous was a show piece.  He swelled with honest pride in the perusal of a popular personal paragraph estimating the value of his silver and cut glass at $50,000.