Chapter IX: Part 9

No complaint is more general—possibly no belief is more prevalent among women—than that a woman of intelligence wastes her energies and her abilities in being merely a housekeeper. Following the domestic arts is a despised calling, held in such contempt by the majority of women that they never take the trouble to achieve success in it; and yet there is no other occupation under the sun that requires so many and such varied talents as does the learned profession of home-making. Did you ever think what a woman must be in order to create and carry on a happy and prosperous home?

She must be a financier. There can be no peace and pleasure in a home where the wolf is always howling under the window and the bill collector hammering on the door. There are, of course, a few men in every community who are such gifted money-makers that they can annex more coin than any woman can spend, but for the great mass of ordinary, industrious, hard-working humanity the wife settles the financial status of the family. It is her ability to handle money, her knowledge of where to spend and where to economize, her knack of making a dollar buy a hundred and five cents’ worth and get a blue trading stamp thrown in to boot, that is at the foundation of every prosperous home. We don’t hear anything about it, because the woman doesn’t know herself how awfully clever she is, but the majority of women in this country are doing marvels of financiering in the way they make both ends meet in their housekeeping allowance, and keep up appearances, that entitle them to qualify in the Rockefeller class.

She must be a general.

She must know how to command. She must know how to set all the multitudinous wheels of household machinery in motion and be able to keep them moving without friction. She must be able to enforce obedience, inspire enthusiasm, plan campaigns, forestall her enemy, be fertile in expedient and subtle in strategy. Any woman who maintains a comfortable and well-ordered home, the kind of a house that we like to visit, and who raises a nice family and marries her daughters off well could give the commander-in-chief of the army points on generalship.

She must be a diplomat. The husband question, the children question and the servant question are not to be handled without gloves. There is no hour of the day that she is not called upon to deal with some problem that requires the finesse of a Talleyrand. She must be able, if the white-winged dove of peace is to brood over the home nest, to deal with her husband’s prejudices and circumvent them so delicately that he will never know that he is being induced to do the thing that he swore he would never, never do. She must assert her authority over the growing boy with such cunning that he does not perceive that her fine Italian hand is on the check rein holding him tight and steady. She must be able, without the girls dreaming that she does it, to insinuate a doubt, drop a word of ridicule, imply an impossibility that will keep her daughters out of entangling alliances and steer them toward the reciprocally profitable permanent treaties they should make.

Above all, she must be able to see most when she is apparently stone blind; hear everything when she seems to be as deaf as the adder of the Scriptures; to be most on guard when she looks to be sleeping at her post, and to be most chaperoning her daughters when the onlooker and the girls themselves would swear that she was most giving them their liberty.

She must know how to tread very softly if she keeps off the corns of her servants, for whether a woman is agreeable or disagreeable in the home her children are bound to stay there with her, but it is the blessed privilege of Mary Ann and Bridget and eke of Hulda and Dinah that they can pack their trunks and go. Only the very quintessence of diplomacy renders a mistress _persona grata_ to the kitchen, and the woman who preserves friendly relations with that must understand the Alpha and Omega of how to make a jolly cover the discipline of a martinet. Any woman who, when she is fifty years old, has a husband who thinks her a Solomon in petticoats, grown children who quote mother’s opinion, and a cook who has been with her five years is fitted to be Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary at the Court of St. James’s, and nothing but the stupidity of a nation that believes that breeches and brains are synonymous terms keeps her out of the job.

She must be an artist.

It is the woman’s province to create the beauty of the home. This is true whether it is the palace of the millionaire or the three-room flat of the day laborer. Every room that she arranges is a picture, just as much as if she painted a Dutch interior on canvas.

She must be a poet.

A home is not merely a place of shelter and food—it is a thing no less of the spirit and soul—and a woman must put into it the passion of her heart and the joy of creating just as truly as a poet must put them into his song. To make a home that is beautiful, that breathes the spirit of home, that is a haven of peace and rest to those who live in it and that is a glimpse of Paradise to the stranger who is bidden within its gates is a profession the most exacting in which any woman can engage and the one that calls for the greatest number of talents. Also it is the most profitable, for within it are made the men and women who go forth to bless the world. And the wonder of wonders is that so many just plain ordinary women are doing it, and the greatest marvel of all is that they do not realize what a glorious thing they are doing!

LXIV

A FATHER’S INFLUENCE

There is no subject under the sun of which men take such a distorted view as they do of a mother’s influence. Romancers have glorified it, poets have idealized it, musicians have sung it until men have honestly come to think that mothers have a practical monopoly of their children and the sole duty and privilege of shaping their lives. Even fathers seem to think that fathers count for nothing and that all they are good for is paying the bills. In the family circle they take a back seat and let mother run the show. It is Mother’s Day that is celebrated with pomp and flowers and beating the cymbals. Nobody notices Father’s Day—perhaps because the first of the month is always Father’s Day and it comes around so often.

No one would belittle mother’s influence. For good or evil it is all powerful. But it is all powerful because father is so often too stupid or too lazy or too careless or too much absorbed in his business to do his duty to his children by helping to mold their characters. He dodges his responsibility. He passes the buck to mother and salves his conscience with a platitude about a mother’s sacred influence, which in his innermost self he recognizes for the hokum it is. For mother’s influence does not always work for righteousness. Motherhood works no miracles. Bearing a baby does not put brains and wisdom in a hen-minded woman’s head. It does not give a shallow woman depth. It does not make a narrow, prejudiced woman broad and tolerant. It does not make a fool woman wise.

Yet all around us we see men who would not trust their wives’ judgment about anything else on earth, turning over to them their children’s immortal souls. They know their wives to be silly and ignorant—without vision, without the ability to see or understand anything beyond their own little circle—yet they let these morons shape their children’s lives. They let them form their children’s ideals and set their standards. They let them decide on the schools their children shall attend, the churches they shall join, the people with whom they associate.

Yet the very men who trust their children to weak and incompetent and unintelligent wives to rear would not dream of permitting a weak, incompetent, unintelligent partner to run their business. They are too well aware of the value of their personal advice and supervision and of the need of their strong and expert hands on the wheel. Men blindly subscribe to the faith that a mother’s influence is bound to be good, especially upon her daughters, yet a moment’s thought would show them how fallacious such a belief is.

A woman can only give out what she has. She can only try to make her daughters what she is. And unless a man wants his daughters to be just the sort of woman their mother is, he cannot safely leave them in her hands.

It is true that there are not many women who deliberately bring up their girls to be immoral and start their feet on the downward path. But there are thousands upon thousands of mothers whose influence upon their daughters is vicious, because they inculcate in them their own low ideals of honor and honesty. They teach them by precept and example to evade every duty of wifehood and motherhood, and from their very infancy up they instil into them a greed and selfishness that wrecks the happiness of all who come in contact with them. Such are the mothers who teach their daughters how to lie and cheat, how to buy on credit the finery they cannot afford, how to kill a man with their extravagance. Such mothers are those whose favorite maxim is that what a husband doesn’t know doesn’t hurt him. Such a mother is the one who, not long ago, I heard say to her young daughter who was getting married: “Don’t tie yourself down with babies. Go about and amuse yourself and have a good time, and if your husband doesn’t like it he can lump it.”

When a man has that kind of a wife—and no man can be so afflicted without knowing it—he does a criminal thing when he leaves his girls to their mother’s influence. It is his bounden duty to use his influence to correct hers as far as possible. Little as men seem to realize it, children nearly always listen with far more respect to what their fathers say than they do to what their mothers say. For the child knows intuitively that the father has had a broader experience of life than the mother has. It knows that the father goes out into the world and does battle with it every day and that he knows from experience the things about which mother vaguely theorizes. It knows that father knows the rules and how to play the game.

Hence when a man really makes any attempt to develop his children’s characters he finds them as clay in his hands, ready to respond to his slightest touch. It is only when father merely uses his influence as a veto power that it is negligible. That a boy needs his father’s hand in directing and controlling him at the critical time of his life and a father’s wisdom to steer him along the right course is universally recognized, but I often think that a girl needs it even more. For a girl needs to be taught the things that life teaches a man. She needs to be taught to be straightforward and honest and to live up to her contracts, that she must give as well as take in life and that she must have the courage and the grit to carry on when things are hard instead of turning quitter and to make the best of a bad bargain. Many a divorce would have been avoided and many a home that is now broken up, kept intact if a father’s influence over his little girl had made her a good sport, instead of mother’s influence developing a yellow streak in her.

A mother’s influence is a great thing, but it needs to be backed up by father’s. That is why God gave every child two parents instead of one.

LXV

THE RICHES OF POOR CHILDREN

The bitterest cry of poor people is that they have nothing to give their children. The fathers and mothers who cannot buy imported finery for their girls or sports-model cars for their boys and send them off to expensive colleges and fill their pockets with money feel that they have come empty-handed to their children and have nothing to give them. Yet the poorest man and woman who bend above a cradle have it in their power to bestow upon their babe treasures so great that their worth cannot be computed in dollars and cents, and that will bring the child more pleasure and happiness in life than they could purchase with all the wealth of the Rothschilds. For there is no price tag on the most precious things in the world. They are equally free to prince and pauper, and more often the beggar gets them than the millionaire does.

For example, there is love—a close, intimate, personal association—and tenderness and understanding. Poor parents can more easily give to their children than the wealthy can. And the child that has them is rich beyond the dreams of avarice, and the child that has them not is poverty-stricken, although it has all else besides. The mother who rocks her baby to sleep on her breast, whose tender arms are always outstretched to gather her youngsters to her heart, who is never too tired or too busy to listen to childish confidences, who surrounds her little ones with a brooding atmosphere of affection,—gives to her children far more than does the rich mother who gives her children nurses and governesses and pony carts and fine clothes and costly playthings but who does not give them herself; who bestows on them everything but the things that a child wants most and needs most—mother love and tenderness, the real mother touch.

Not long ago a very rich young man figured in a disgraceful scandal, and the one excuse offered in his defense was that his mother was dead and his father had never given him anything except money. He had never had any affection bestowed upon him. He had had no parental guidance. When a little lad he had been put in a school and kept there without even being visited by any one who loved him, without even going home for vacations. He had been just a pitiful little millionaire waif for whom nobody cared. The lot of such a child is infinitely worse than that of the one whose parents are in such humble circumstances that they can give it perhaps only the plainest of food and clothes, but who do give it a real home that is full of close, warm family life. The fathers and mothers to whom children are grateful and whose memories they revere are not those who bequeath them great fortunes, but those who leave them the memory of a love and understanding that never failed and of a childhood that was made sweet by their parents’ cherishing.

No matter how poor you are, you can give your children love and companionship and the privilege of growing up in a peaceful and cheerful home, and that is something that few rich parents can give their children.

Another gift that you can make your children is that of teaching them how to read. When you do that you really don’t need to do much more for them, because you have put a magic coin in their hands that will buy them entrance into all the doors of delight and open to them all of the portals of romance. No one who loves to read can ever be bored or lonely. He or she has only to open a book, and, presto, he or she has for company all of the wit and wisdom of the ages. Gay adventures, beautiful ladies and gallant gentlemen beckon, and one has only to follow them into realms of enchantment. All of interest, all that informs, that thrills, that amuses, is the property of the reader. But, reading does not always come by nature, as Dogberry thought it did. Often it has to be acquired by art, but any child can be taught to like to read; it can be given the reading habit, and no other gift can possibly be bestowed upon it that is half so valuable or that will bring it in such happiness or that will be such an ark of refuge to it in times of trouble.

Another gift that the poorest parents can make to their children is to teach them how to see. Most persons go through the world as blind as bats. They never see anything that isn’t directly under their noses, and thereby they miss half of the fun and pleasure in living. There are men and women to whom a sunset is just a phenomenon of nature that happens every day; to whom a crowd is just a jam of people; who get nothing out of travel but inconvenience and missing the particular kind of breakfast food they prefer, and who loathe rain because they get their feet wet and hate snow because it is messy. And there are other men and women who see the glory of God in every flaming sunset; who thrill to the finger tips at the drama they see enacted in every crowd; to whom travel opens up a new world; to whom every rain is a symphony and every snowstorm a poem.

Which of these get the most out of life—those who see or those who are blind; those who can get pleasure out of little things or those who are too dull and dumb to amuse themselves; those who are sensitive to every beauty in nature, who appreciate music and art and literature, who get the last flavor out of good cooking, or those who find everything flat and stale and uninteresting because they have never been taught to see the under side of things?

Finally, the poorest parents can teach their children that brave attitude toward life without which all the balance is cinders, ashes, and dust. For disappointments and trouble come to us all, and it is only those who have been taught how to make the best of their bad bargains, how to laugh at misfortune and mock at fate, who achieve any real happiness in life. So cheer up, you parents who complain that you have nothing to give your children. You can give them love. You can teach them to read and to see things. You can give them a brave heart. These gifts are worth more than money. And nobody can take them away from those who have them.

LXVI

A MAN’S RIGHT TO HIS HOME

It is a matter of continual wonder to me that women do not realize how unjustly they treat their husbands about their homes. Of course, a woman’s home is her castle and all that, and it is right and proper that she should be the ruler of it. Moreover, inasmuch as the average man is in his home only a very few of his waking hours, while his wife spends practically all of her time in it, it is more important that it should come up to her ideal and fire her fancy than his. She should have the right of choice in selecting the neighborhood she desires to live in, because she has to know the people next door and look across the street all day, and he doesn’t. Nor should any mere husband presume to dictate about the number, size, and arrangements of the closets in a house that is going to be his wife’s workshop. Nor should a man interfere with his wife’s taste in decoration, no matter how much it runs to putting ruffled petticoats on the furniture and installing forests of floor lamps, for having a home dolled up as she wants it, fills a woman with a great and exceeding peace and joy, and no good husband should withhold this pleasure from his wife.

But all that does not give the wife the right to monopolize the home and use it for her sole behoof and benefit, as so many women think it does. The man who pays the freight, the man who buys the house and who supports it, should have a few poor, simple privileges in it which even a wife should recognize and respect. He should at least, in all common fairness, have the status of a star boarder in the home his money keeps a going concern. He seldom does, however. There is not one home in a thousand where the man of the house has even a room of his own which he can furnish in accordance with his own taste and where he can mess around as much as he likes.

I have known many men who tried to establish dens for themselves in their houses, but before they got fairly settled, with their collections of stamps or fishing rods or stuffed animals or what-not disposed around them, their wives decided that it would be just the place for a sewing room or the nursery. Three hooks in a closet and a couple of drawers in a chiffonier are about all most men get for their private use in their homes, and at that they generally find that their wives and daughters have superimposed feminine fripperies over their best suits and parked their silk stockings on top of their shirts. So universal is the feeling among women they have a right to the entire house that when a wife does concede an easy chair and a reading lamp to her husband she boasts of it loudly and calls everybody’s attention to her unusual and generous gesture, whereat all marvel. And even her husband himself puffs out his chest and feels that he is a pampered household pet.

Why women should feel that they have an exclusive right to exercise the hospitality of the home nobody knows, but they do. If you will observe you will see that in most homes it is the wife’s family who are perpetually billeted in the spare bedroom, while the husband’s family makes few and occasional visits. You will also observe that there are ten men who have their mothers-in-law living with them to one man whose mother resides under his roof. Any wife would think it very mean in him if her husband did not extend a cordial welcome to Aunt Sally and Cousin Sue when they were invited for a visit and if he wasn’t willing to have her pretty young sister come and stay indefinitely in town with them so as to have the benefits of the city. And she expects him to register great joy when her mother telegraphs that she is coming for a month or two.

But it is another pair of sleeves when it comes to a husband’s relatives, and there are precious few men who would dare to dump a bunch of their kinspeople on their wives. Many a man is afraid to ask even his own mother to come to see him. The average husband would fall dead with surprise if his wife ever intimated to him that she considered the fact that he paid for the rent and food and light and heat and general upkeep of the home gave him just as much right to have his family stay with them as she had to have hers.

As to the friends who come to the house, the wife considers it her prerogative to settle that little matter by herself and thinks that her husband has nothing to do with it. She spreads the mat with “Welcome” on it for those she likes and slams and bolts the door in the faces of those she doesn’t fancy. And she practically never fancies her husband’s old friends. So the man who had looked forward to having his old friends in his new home, who had dreamed of long talks with Tom by his fireside and to having Bob, who was closer than a brother, drop in at any time for pot-luck finds, somehow, not only that they do not come, but that he is afraid to ask them to come. Wives are always complaining that their husbands are not willing to stay at home. Perhaps the remedy is making the home a democracy instead of an autocracy. If men had more rights and privileges at home they might like staying in it better.

LXVII

DEVOURING FRIENDS

“One of the greatest pests in the world is what I call the devouring friend,” said a woman the other day. “She is a bloodthirsty cannibal who gobbles you up alive, and you have no way of protecting yourself against her, because the sacred name of friendship bars the use of all the lethal weapons that you can use in defending yourself against other bores and social nuisances.

“Of course, the common or garden variety of devouring friend is the one who literally eats you out of house and home. She is a self-invited guest who drops you a little note saying that she is passing through your city or that she has to have a little dental work done or wants to consult a doctor or do some shopping, and she does so pine to see her darling Susan and talk over old times, and will it be convenient for her to come and spend a few days with you? All of which being translated simply means that she desires to graft a hotel bill off you.

“Anyway, she comes and camps in your spare room by the week, because she always manages to string out the dental work or the appointments with the doctor or the milliner. She should worry. For she is having a good time at no expense. Furthermore, by hints and insinuations she inveigles your husband into taking her to places of amusement that you have not felt that you could afford even when there were only two of you to pay for. And she runs your grocery bill up to the skies because she develops a taste for the most expensive food. And as you see her calmly consuming the price of your new dress you know exactly how a cornfield feels when a swarm of seven-year locusts settles down on it and goes into action.

“Then there are the devouring friends who eat up your time. I am a busy woman. I cannot afford to waste a minute. Unfortunately for me, I have a number of women friends who are rich and whose principal occupation in life is killing time. Now, these women know perfectly well that I not only do all of my own housework but that I make my children’s clothes and that if they kill a morning for me they upset my whole schedule and make my work pile up upon me so that my labor is twice as hard.

“But does that keep them from interrupting me? Lord, no. Every time Maud has a spat with her mother-in-law she will drop over and spend a whole morning giving me all the harrowing details. Every time Lulu’s husband gives her a new limousine I have to waste hours of my valuable time listening to a minute description of all its splendor. Every time Sallie and Susie want to be sympathized with or want to brag about their children they ruin the heart of a day’s work for me by backing me up against a wall and making me listen. And a dozen times a day I am interrupted by women who call me up over the telephone to hold long and fruitless conversations about nothing.

“Yet there is no possible way to protect my precious time against these friends who eat it up. They are all charming women. They like me and I like them. I want to retain their friendship, so I cannot shut my door in their faces when they come to see me. I can’t ask them to leave when they stay too long. I can’t ring off when they call me over the telephone. I can’t even say ‘damn’ aloud, no matter how much I am thinking it. But I know what the cynic meant when he said that if God would save him from his friends he would protect himself from his enemies.

“Then there are the devouring friends who swallow up all of your home life. My husband’s business is such that he has only one or two evenings at home a week. We would like to have these to ourselves to keep up our acquaintance or to go out on a little spree together. We have proclaimed this fact loudly and long to our friends and we refuse every invitation that it is possible to get out of for those two sacred occasions. But it doesn’t do a particle of good.

“Being an unusually charming and entertaining individual, my husband is regarded by my friends as a social tidbit—a particularly savory _hors d’œuvre_, as it were—and they gobble up our evenings together without the slightest compunction. If we won’t go to them, all right. They will come to us. So just about the time we are settling down for a real heart-to-heart talk, here come the Smiths to pass a pleasant evening with us, or the Joneses descend upon us and bear us off, shrieking and protesting, to listen to their new radio, or the Thompsons telephone that they are just coming over for a game of bridge.

“And there are the other devouring friends who nibble away at our independence like a mouse at a cheese, until some day we suddenly wake up to the fact that our freedom is all gone. We haven’t a vestige of liberty left. We dare not give a party and leave them out. We have to explain to them everything we do and tag meekly along in their footsteps. And there are other devouring friends who gnaw constantly on our sympathies by telling us all of their troubles and making us bear their burdens for them. They are ghouls who make us feed them our hearts to satisfy their morbid appetite for pity. Perhaps there is no way to get rid of devouring friends, but it certainly would add to the pleasures of life if we could swat them as we do other household pests.”

LXVIII

THE SECRET OF HAPPINESS

What is the secret of happiness? I once asked Mary Anderson this question and she replied: “To find out what you want of life, and then to have the courage to take it. I wanted quiet, seclusion, home and husband and children, the ordinary domestic life of woman,” she went on. “I had the courage to leave the stage at the very height of my career. And I have had the courage to refuse every offer to go back, no matter how dazzling it was. I have also had the courage to stay in my sleepy little village and refuse to let myself be drawn into the brilliant whirl of London society. I have been happy because I knew what I wanted, and I have been brave enough to take it in spite of all temptations to be led into doing the things that I did not want to do.”

Undoubtedly this is one of the answers to the great riddle that we are always asking and that so few solve. A great many people are unhappy because they do not really know what they want. They have no clear vision of the thing they are seeking. They are torn between conflicting desires and never settle down to any one thing, and find contentment and peace in that. You see this exemplified in the men who are always changing from one occupation to another, and who work with their minds on their golf and play golf with their minds on their work. You see it in the women who are fretful and peevish wives and mothers, complaining of the burdens of domesticity and feeling that they have missed happiness in not following some career, and in the women who have followed careers and who are always bemoaning their loneliness because they have no families. Yet how seldom do the disgruntled, who lament their fate in life so loudly, have the courage to face about and take the road that they at least believe leads to happiness! We behold so many idle tears that we are inclined to believe there are vast numbers of human beings who get a kind of morbid pleasure out of misery.

But what is the secret of happiness? I give four guesses at the conundrum. The first is work, to keep so busy that we do not have leisure to think whether we are happy or not. There is no other pleasure comparable to the clean joy of being swallowed up in some useful, constructive work that calls forth every power of mind and body. Your own job, that you do competently, has for you a never-failing interest, a perpetual thrill that nothing else in the world can give. Only brainless idiots are content to loaf. Intelligent, thinking men and women must keep busy in order to be happy.

My second guess is that happiness is the bird in the hand and not the bird in the bush. If we are ever to be happy we must be happy now at the present moment. We cannot put it off until to-morrow. You are always hearing people say that they are going to do this and that when they get rich, that they are going to travel when they are old, they are going to play, they are going to take up old acquaintances, they are going to enjoy themselves five, ten, twenty years hence. But when the time comes that they have set to be happy in, they find that they have lost their capacity for enjoyment. Those who have inched and pinched and sweated every penny trying to accumulate a fortune have formed such a habit of parsimony that it is agony to them to spend money. Those who have denied themselves too much have lost all desire. Those who have stayed at home too long have become such a fixture on Main Street that they are lonesome and homesick everywhere else.

So the happy men and women are those who take the goods the gods provide each hour. They make a reasonable provision against the rainy day, and then they indulge themselves in the good clothes, the pretty home, the comfortable car, the palatable food, the little trips that are within their reach. They do not put off every pleasure until some mythical, problematic day, when they will be able to live in a palace and have a Rolls-Royce and Paris clothes and when they will be too old and rheumatic and set in their ways to want to do anything but sit by the fire in their own familiar chair. Never was there sounder philosophy conveyed than in the old comic opera ditty which said, “I want what I want when I want it,” and if we don’t take it then, it is dust and ashes in our teeth.

Happiness consists in simple things. We are always envying the rich and great, and think how happy they must be, but we might well pity them, for they have far more sources of sorrow than we have. Beyond a modest competence, riches are a burden, and money can become a curse that blights every natural joy. The millionaire is cut off from the greatest of all happiness—that of knowing himself loved for himself alone. He suspects the motive of every friend, he does not even trust the woman he marries, and he knows his wealth to be a blight upon his children. The real source of happiness is in enjoying simple things—a gorgeous sunset, a beautiful landscape, a clever book, a good dinner, the talk of a friend, the unfaltering love of husband or wife, a baby’s arms around your neck, a fine son and daughter filling you with pride and joy. These have no price tag on them. They may belong just as much to the poor man as the rich man. Indeed, they oftener do.

Finally, remember the song, “I Want to Be Happy, but I Can’t Be Happy Till I Make You Happy, Too.” In unselfishness, in doing good to others—that is the real answer to the secret of how to be happy.

LXIX

PREPAREDNESS FOR OLD AGE

What are you storing up for your old age? Are you laying up any money against the time when you will be old and feeble and no longer able to work? The hour will strike for you, as it does for others, when your earning powers will be gone. Your hands will be too stiff and clumsy to keep on with their accustomed task. Your mind will be too slow to go the pace in the fierce competition in the commercial world. If you are an employee, you will lose your job. If you are a business man, you will find that your trade has somehow drifted away from you. If you are a professional man, you will be superseded by the new men whose stars are just rising on the horizon.

Nothing that you can do will alter these conditions. No miracle will save you from the common fate of all who grow old. But if you have saved up enough money to make you independent, it will be merely a matter of mild regret to you. If, however, you have laid up nothing for the rainy day that is bound to come to you, it will be a tragedy that you will pray death to end.

For in all the world there are no people so piteous and forlorn as those who are forced to eat the bitter bread of dependence in their old age, and find how steep are the stairs of another man’s house. Wherever they go they know themselves unwelcome. Wherever they are, they feel themselves a burden. There is no humiliation of the spirit they are not forced to endure. Their hearts are scarred all over with the stabs from cruel and callous speeches.

In youth money is a convenience, an aid to pleasure. In age it is an absolute necessity, for when we are old we have to buy even consideration and politeness from those about us. This is true even in the households of our own children, for between the father and mother who are able to pay their own way and are the source of a never-ending flow of gifts and treats, and the father and mother who must be supported is a great gulf fixed. It is the difference between having the place of honor and the back seat; between being listened to with respect and having one’s opinions derided; between having one’s little peculiarities catered to as interesting characteristics and being snubbed for one’s old-fashioned ways.

Nor is this as unfeeling and hard-boiled as it seems. The average young couple has all it can do, in these times of the high cost of living, to provide for itself and the children, and it makes the burden crushing to have to add the extra weight of the support of the old people of the families.

The fate of the dependent old is so terrible that it is a marvel that it does not frighten every one into trying to provide against it. Yet it was recently stated in a journal of statistics that 80 per cent of the men and women more than sixty years of age were dependent either upon their children or upon public charity. Don’t let this misfortune befall you. Guard against it. Begin systematic saving while you are young, so that when you are old you will at least have the comfort of being independent.

Are you laying up affection for your old age? Most of us have a curious and naïve belief in what we call “natural affection.” We befool ourselves into thinking that people must love us because they stand in a certain relationship to us and because there are blood ties between us. Never was there a more fallacious theory. There is, to be sure, the mother’s passion for the child she has borne and the instinctive clinging of the child to its mother while it is young and helpless, but that is all. It doesn’t follow as a matter of course that grown-up men and women love their parents just because they are their parents. As a matter of fact, they don’t, unless the father and mother have won their love by years of tenderness and understanding and sympathy. You can’t be hard and tyrannical and selfish and stingy with your children and expect them to love you because it is their duty to do so. If you want your children to love you when you are old, you have to begin winning their hearts when they are in the cradle.

Have you laid up a good supply of friendship for your old age? No complaint is heard more often from the old than that they are lonely. Few come to see them. They are seldom asked out. No one sends them flowers when they are sick. They are neglected and they crave the little attentions that we all like and yearn for the society of their fellow creatures. Now, when old people are lonely, it is always their own fault. It is because they have neglected to lay up any friendships for the sere and yellow days when they have no longer the power to attract people to them.

They have gone their selfish way through life, sufficient unto themselves in their youth. They have never held out a helping hand to those in need. They have never wept with those who wept and rejoiced with those who rejoiced. They have not bothered to write notes of condolence or congratulation. They have never visited the sick and afflicted. They have never spent an hour listening to an old person’s garrulous talk, and so, when they get old, they are repaid in the same coin.

Are you laying up any mental riches for your old age? I know an old lady so feeble that she cannot stir from her chair, and whose eyes have failed so that she cannot tell day from night, and who is so deaf that she cannot be read to, but who passes her days delightfully reciting to herself whole cantos of Scott and Byron and recalling word for word chapters of Dickens and Thackeray and Miss Austen. Her mind to her a kingdom is, in which she finds entertainment and amusement. Will you be amused or bored when you are in your nineties and have nothing but your own society? I know another woman, middle-aged, who is deliberately laying up a treasure of memories of travel to solace her in her old age. She will never know a dull moment, for she will have something to think about besides her rheumatism and her diet when she sits alone in the twilight of life.

Old age comes to us all. Don’t let it find you empty-handed or empty-minded. Thus shall you make it a time of happiness instead of torment.

_The Blue Book of Social Usage_—

Etiquette

In Society, In Business, In Politics, and At Home

_By EMILY POST_

“The most complete book on social usage that ever grew between two covers.” There are 24 pages about introductions and greetings, 7 about street conduct, 13 on conduct at the theatre, 10 on conversation, 25 on cards and visits, 33 on invitations, 12 on teas, 61 on dinners, 12 on breakfasts and suppers, 26 on balls and dances, 12 on “the debutante,” 12 on matrimonial engagements, 33 on preparations for the wedding, 35 on “the day of the wedding,” 23 on funerals, 58 on letters, 22 on dress, 9 on the clothes of a gentleman, 34 on the well-appointed house, 24 on traveling at home and abroad.

The author is a shining figure in society and her charming and popular book is accepted everywhere as the authoritative Blue Book of Social Usage. Illustrated.

_Crown 8vo, Cloth. 639 pages. $4, net; flexible leather, $7.50, net; postage, 18c extra._

_The Blue Book of Personal Attire_—

How to Dress Well

A valuable treatise by an authority which considers dress for women from both the artistic and the practical view-points, and provides sound information on the principles of tasteful and attractive apparel. Not only does this book give details for enhancing one’s personal appearance, for slenderizing the stout, for broadening the slender, for the selection of headwear and other accessories, but also practical guidance for the selection and testing of materials, choosing of laces and furs, budgeting the dress allowance, and for the care and up keep of the wardrobe. It is brimful of the very information pertaining to dress, color, and toilet accessories about which every woman hesitates to accept any but truly trustworthy advice and is a fitting companion to Emily Post’s “Etiquette.” Modistes, designers, dressmakers, and milliners will also find this work of highest value. Illustrated.

_8vo, Cloth. 494 pages. $3.50, net; postage, 18c extra._

The Blue Book of Cookery And Manual of House Management

_By ISABEL COTTON SMITH_

_With an Introduction by Emily Post, Author of “Etiquette”_

This is not “just another cookbook,” but an original and authoritative guide for the preparation of foods and for house management. All the originality and importance of this volume would be of limited value unless it were written by so capable and practical an authority as Isabel Cotton Smith. It contains more than 2,000 recipes; gives complete information on the management of house and home, with invaluable suggestions for table economy, and includes everything for every season and every day in the year, for every possible repast from breakfast to late supper and from teas and picnic meals to specially designed menus for children at home and at school, as well as menus for vegetarians.

_Crown 8vo, Washable Fabrikoid. $2.50, net; postage, 18c extra._

A Woman of Fifty

_By RHETA CHILDE DORR_

This unique autobiography of a remarkable and courageous woman covers one of the most revolutionary periods of time in history—from virtually the beginning of a concerted movement to organize the women of this country in the fight for equality in politics and industry to the time when these hitherto unattainable causes were firmly established in our economic and governmental systems. As journalist, lecturer, editor, and writer, the author has taken part in virtually every event that marks her generation; was the only woman war correspondent with the famed Russian Women’s “Battalion of Death” on the last Kerensky offensive on the Eastern Front; spent three years in “after war” Europe, and is to-day in the thick of things in this country. Written in a frank, forceful, and grippingly interesting style.

_8vo, Cloth. 482 pp. $2.50, net; postage, 18c extra._

FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY, Publishers
354-360 Fourth Avenue, New York

Transcriber’s Notes

pg 58 Changed: which are resonsible for more real
to: which are responsible for more real

pg 61 Changed: you happen to be born in a certain relationshp
to: you happen to be born in a certain relationship

pg 71 Changed: any particular trade or profesion
to: any particular trade or profession

pg 101 Changed: earn her own living as a “poor working women.”
to: earn her own living as a “poor working woman.”

pg 105 Changed: so far be it from me to abridge
to: so far be it for me to abridge

pg 150 Changed: life better than than that of the successful
to: life better than that of the successful

pg 179 Changed: he will be filled fell of pep and energy
to: he will be filled full of pep and energy

pg 179 Changed: discovery that somewhow the mysterious something
to: discovery that somehow the mysterious something

pg 188 Changed: she is not likely to tarnish your deal.
to: she is not likely to tarnish your ideal.

pg 217 Changed: as many men starving for affection as there are woman.
to: as many men starving for affection as there are women.

pg 218 Changed: reward depends altogther on his wife’s attitude
to: reward depends altogether on his wife’s attitude

pg 221 Changed: their purpose when they falter and waiver
to: their purpose when they falter and waver