What professional art could make the vestibule of your house—­a rented cottage, maybe—­the gateway to another, and a purer, higher, happier sphere than the world you shut out with the closing of the front door?  You would never get upon so much as bowing terms with your better self but for that front door and the latch key which lets you into the hall brightened by loving smiles, made merry by welcoming voices.

Talk of the prose of everyday life!  When Poetry is hounded from every other nook of the earth which the Maker of it meant should be one vast, sublime epic, she will find an inviolable retreat under the Lares and Penates guarding the ingleside, and crown as priestess forever the wife and mother who makes and keeps the Home.

It could hardly be otherwise.  To no other of his co-workers does the Lord of life grant such opportunities as to woman.  Her baby is laid in the mother’s arms to have, and to hold, and to fashion, without let or hindrance.  His mind and heart are unwritten paper, and Nature and Providence unite in waving aside all who would interfere with what she chooses to inscribe thereupon.  Her growing boys and girls believe in her with absoluteness no other friend will ever inspire—­not in her love alone, but in her infallibility and her omnipotence.  It is a moment of terror and often the turning point in a child’s life, when first he comprehends that there are hurts his mother cannot heal, knowledge which he needs and she cannot impart.

If the boundaries of home seem sometimes to circumscribe a woman’s sphere, they are also a safe barricade within which husband, and the children who have come to man’s estate, find retreat from the outer storm and stress, a sanctuary where love feeds the flame upon the domestic altar.  There, the atmosphere, like that of St. Peter’s Church, never changes.  It refreshes when the breath of the world is a simoon, withering heart and strength.  When the winds of adversity are bleak, the shivering wanderer returns to the fold, “curtained and closed and warm—­” to gather force for to-morrow’s strain.

     “Love, rest and home!”

we sing with moistened eyes.  The blessed three are put in trust with woman.  Other stations of honor and usefulness may be opened to her, but this is the realm of which nothing can dispossess her.  The leaven that leavens the nations is wrought by her hands.  Hers is the seedtime that determines what harvest the Master shall reap.  To her is committed the holy task of preserving all that we can know of a lost paradise until we see the light flash out for our eager eyes from the wide doors of what—­when we would draw it nearest and make it dearest to our hearts—­we call our Changeless Home.

CHAPTER I.

Sisterly discourse with john’s wife concerning John.

John is not John until he is married.  He assumes the sobriquet at the altar as truly as his bride takes the title of “Mistress” or “Madame.”  Once taken, the name is generic, inalienable and untransferable.  Yet, as few men marry until they have attained legal majority, it follows that your John—­my John—­every wife’s John—­must have been in making for a term of years before he fell into our hands.