“He was—­”

The day had gone and the plot with it.

With a half-sob she sat down and wrote with tired and trembling fingers: 

"He was—­this morning.  He isn’t now!"

But will not my readers agree with me that she was a genuine wife, mother, housekeeper,—­in short, a “chink-filler?”

CHAPTER VII.

MUST-HAVES AND MAY-BES.

“A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite’s Life,” one of the most charming, as well as one of the most helpful of Adeline D.T.  Whitney’s books, was sent into the world over a quarter-century ago.  But age cannot wither nor custom stale, nor render old-fashioned the delightful volume with its many quaint and original ideas.  Others besides girls have learned the practical truth of one sentence which, for the good it has done, deserves to be written in letters of gold: 

“Something must be crowded out.”

More than one perplexed and conscientious worker has, like myself, written it out in large text and tacked it up in sewing-room, kitchen, or over a desk.

In the beginning, I want to guard what may seem to be a weak point by stating, first and above all, that this is not an excuse for slighting or “slurring over” our legitimate work.

One easygoing housekeeper used to say that, in her opinion, there was a genius in slighting.  Her home attested the fact that she had reduced the habit of leaving things undone to a science, but it is doubtful if the so-called genius differed largely from that which forms a prominent characteristic of the porcine mother, and enables her to enjoy her home and little ones with apparent indifference to the fact that outsiders denominate one a sty, and her offspring small pigs.

Not very long ago I was frequently brought into contact with a woman who has, as all her friends acknowledge, a faculty for “turning off work.”  She has a jaunty knack of pinning trimming on a hat, which, although bare and stiff in the start, evolves into a toque or capote that a French milliner need not blush to confess as her handiwork.  She can run up the seams in a dress-skirt with speed that fills the slower sisters working at her side with sad envy.  She puts up preserves with marvelous dexterity, and can toss together eggs, butter, sugar and flour, and turn out a cake in less time than an ordinary woman would consume in creaming the butter and sugar.  But it is an obvious fact that the work of this remarkable woman lacks “staying power.”  Her too rapid and long stitches often give way, allowing between them mortifying glimpses of white under-waist or skirt to obtrude themselves; in a high wind the trimmings or feathers are likely to blow loose from the dainty bonnets; her preserves ferment, and have to be “boiled down,” while the cutting of her cake reveals the truth that under the top-crust are heavy streaks, like a stratum of igneous formation shot athwart the aqueous.  The maker of gown, hat, preserves, and cake lacks thoroughness.  As one irreverent young man once said after dancing with her—­“she is all the time tumbling to pieces.”