What I have to do with now is John’s unreasonable desire that his wife should—­as the help-meet of a man who has his own way to make in the world—­dress as well as when she was the unmarried daughter of an elderly gentleman whose way was made.  Every sensible girl married to a poor man comprehends, as one trait of wifely duty, that she must make her trousseau last and look well as long as she can.  In the honorable dread of suggesting to him whose fortune she has elected to share, that when her handsome gowns are no longer wearable she must replace lace with cotton lawns, and silk with all-wool merino or serge, she devises excuses for sparing the costly fabrics—­pretexts which, to his shame it is said, he is prone to misunderstand.  If men such as he could guess at the repressed longings for the brave array of other times that assail the wearers of well-saved—­therefore passee—­finery, at sight of other women less conscientious, or with richer husbands than themselves, reveling in the latest and most enticing modes—­if eyes scornful of plain attire could penetrate to the jealously locked closet where feminine vanity and native extravagance are kept under watch and ward by the love the critic is ready to doubt,—­print, gingham and stuff gowns would be fairer than ermine and velvet in John’s esteem.

CHAPTER VI.

CHINK-FILLERS.

At a recent conference of practical housewives and mothers held in a western city, one of the leaders told, as illustrative of the topic under discussion, an incident of her childhood.  When a little girl of seven years, she stood by her father, looking at a new log-cabin.

“Papa,” she observed, “it is all finished, isn’t it?”

“No, my daughter, look again!”

The child studied the structure before her.  The neatly hewed logs were in their proper places.  The roof, and the rough chimney, were complete, but, on close scrutiny, one could see the daylight filtering through the interstices of the logs.  It had yet to be “chinked.”

When this anecdote was ended, a bright little woman arose and returned her thanks for the story, for, she said, she had come to the conclusion that she was one of the persons who had been put in the world to “fill up the chinks.”

The chink-fillers are among the most useful members of society.  The fact is patent of the founder of one of our great educational systems, that he grasped large plans and theories, but had no talent for minutiae.  What would his majestic outlines be without the army of workers who, with a just comprehension of the importance of detail, fill in the chinks in the vast enterprise?

Putty may be a mean, cheap article, far inferior to the clear, transparent crystal pane, but what would become of the costly plate-glass were there no putty to fill in the grooves in which it rests, and to secure it against shocks?