p. 13 | Is the Home to be Lost to the World?

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 5, 1916

Is the Home to be Lost to the World?

By Martha E. Warner

Fragments of Conversation Heard on the Street, in Stores, Banks, Hospitals, Etc.

MARTHA E. WARNER

“It makes a fellow think twice about getting married when he sees a week’s wages on a girl’s head,” said a young man, as a dainty girl wearing an expensive hat passed him.

“Miss Page is a nice girl,” remarked another young man; “we have been friends for nearly a year, but we are not engaged. I do not intend to marry — I want to be free.”

“You say if I have not been able to save any money before getting married, I shall surely not be able to save afterward,” said a young man to his older companion. “But the girl I expect to marry will work. She is working now, and can keep on. Together we shall soon have a bank account.”

“You will marry him?” said a girl to her friend across the counter. “Oh, I don’t know,” was the reply; “if I marry, I’ll have to learn to cook and keep house, and I’m not anxious for that job.”

“They don’t get along a bit well,” said a voice back of me. “Lila wasn’t satisfied at home, so she married to get away; and now she has trouble, it serves her right. I haven’t been near her.”

“Yes, I have left Jack,” said a young woman. “I could not stand being tied in a house all day. I want to be on the go all the time. Jack doesn’t; so he goes his way, and I go mine. Divorce is the only way out of it.”

“I married to get rid of work,” remarked a woman with a baby in her arms and two little ones clinging to her skirts, as she stood waiting for a car.

“Housework I hate, and housework I will not do,” said a pretty girl to her friend. “If I marry Phil, and he can’t keep a servant, I will manage some way to get out of it.”

“My time is too important to spend in sweeping a room,” said a trained nurse.

“I’m too talented to do housework,” said another nurse to her friend, who had begged her to try to win back the love and respect of her husband by keeping their home neat and clean.

“I told John if he did not keep help, I would not marry him,” said one young woman. “I told him I would not wash dishes for any one — we’d use wooden plates first. Then he got mad, and said, ‘There will be no wedding, then.’”

It is a sad thing to note that the present-day conditions of society are tending to break down and destroy all that remains of the home, the fragment left to this sorry old world of Eden itself. We need to respect and honor the home, divinely made and given to man, and to teach our sons and daughters to do the same.

Clintonville, Conn.