“Yes, I see what you mean,” I said.  This is what one usually says when one does not quite know what another is driving at; but in this case I really did know, or thought I did.  “That survival of the conscience is a very curious thing, especially in our eternal-womanly.  I suppose that the North American conscience was evolved from the rudimental European conscience during the first centuries of struggle here, and was more or less religious and economical in its origin.  But with the advance of wealth and the decay of faith among us, the conscience seems to be simply conscientious, or, if it is otherwise, it is social.  The eternal-womanly continues along the old lines of housekeeping from an atavistic impulse, and no one woman can stop because all the other women are going on.  It is something in the air, or something in the blood.  Perhaps it is something in both.”

“Yes,” said my friend, quite as I had said already, “I see what you mean.  But I think it is in the air more than in the blood.  I was in Paris, about this time last year, perhaps because I was the only thing in my house that had not been swathed in cheese-cloth, or tied up in a bag with drawstrings, or rolled up with moth-balls and put away in chests.  At any rate, I was there.  One day I left my wife in New York carefully tagging three worn-out feather dusters, and putting them into a pillow-case, and tagging it, and putting the pillow-case into a camphorated self-sealing paper sack, and tagging it; and another day I was in Paris, dining at the house of a lady whom I asked how she managed with the things in her house when she went into the country for the summer.  ’Leave them just as they are,’ she said.  ’But what about the dust and the moths, and the rust and the tarnish?’ She said, ’Why, the things would have to be all gone over when I came back in the autumn, anyway, and why should I give myself double trouble?’ I asked her if she didn’t even roll anything up and put it away in closets, and she said:  ’Oh, you mean that old American horror of getting ready to go away.  I used to go through all that at home, too, but I shouldn’t dream of it here.  In the first place, there are no closets in the house, and I couldn’t put anything away if I wanted to.  And really nothing happens.  I scatter some Persian powder along the edges of things, and under the lower shelves, and in the dim corners, and I pull down the shades.  When I come back in the fall I have the powder swept out, and the shades pulled up, and begin living again.  Suppose a little dust has got in, and the moths have nibbled a little here and there?  The whole damage would not amount to half the cost of putting everything away and taking everything out, not to speak of the weeks of discomfort, and the wear and tear of spirit.  No, thank goodness—­I left American housekeeping in America.’  I asked her:  ‘But if you went back?’ and she gave a sigh, and said: 

“’I suppose I should go back to that, along with all the rest.  Everybody does it there.’  So you see,” my friend concluded, “it’s in the air, rather than the blood.”