As the months wear on, Mary learns, if her spouse does not, that white muslin comes to grief so speedily in the course of even light housework, as to swell the laundry bills inordinately.  The embroidered tea-gowns in which she used to array herself upon the rare occasions of her betrothed’s morning calls, gather dust streaks upon skirts and the under sides of the sleeves, and, watch as she may, catch spots in the kitchen.  She considers,—­being lovingly determined to help, not hinder her mate,—­that his purse must purchase new garments when her trousseau is worn out, and she saves her best clothes for “occasions.”  John, being her husband, is no longer an occasion.  Dark prints and ginghams, simply made, and freshened up at meal-times by full white aprons, are serviceable, sensible, economical and significant of our dear Mary’s practical wisdom.  They are by so many degrees less becoming to her than the dainty apparel of loverly memory, that we do not wonder at the surprised discontent of the young husband.

Marriage has made no distinct change in his apparel.  In his business a man must be decent, or he loses credit.  In masculine ignorance of the immutable law that in dislodging dirt some must cling to the garments and person of the toiler, he sets down his wife’s altered appearance to indifference to his happiness.  She may have labored from an early breakfast to a late dinner to make his home comfortable and tasteful; into each of the dishes served up with secret pride for his consumption, may have gone a wealth of love and earnest desire that would have set up ten poets in sonnets and madrigals.  Because her hands are roughened and her complexion muddied by her work, and—­in the knowledge that dishes are to be washed and the table re-set for breakfast, and the kitchen cleared up after he has been regaled—­she has slipped on a dark frock in which she was wont to receive him on rainy evenings—­he falls into a brown and cynical study, which dishonors his wife only a little more than it disgraces himself and human nature.  “Time was”—­so runs his musing—­“when she thought it worth her while to take pains to look pretty.  That was when there was still a chance of a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip.  She has me fast now, and anything is good enough for a husband.”

Not one syllable of this chapter is penned for the woman who deserves an iota of censure like the above.  It is a wife’s duty to study to look well in her husband’s eyes, always and in all circumstances.  Her person should be scrupulously clean, her hair becomingly arranged, her working-gown as neat as she can keep it, and relieved before John comes in by clean collar or ruching and a smooth white apron.  It is altogether possible for the woman who “does her own work” to be as “well set-up”—­to borrow a sporting phrase from John—­as her rich neighbor who can drag a train over Oriental rugs from the moment she rises to a late breakfast until she sweeps yards of brocade and velvet up the polished stairs after ball, dinner or theatre-party.