TWO GIRLS WHO BECAME WIVES.
By Ladies' Home Journal
A VERY bright girl, by name Jane Ferrar, was married a dozen years ago. She was an able, ambitious girl. She was active in club work, and the clubs to which she belonged numbered some six. When she married she preferred not to keep house. "I certainly shall not waste my life by giving it to housework," she argued. She said: "The class of women who once were housemaids are now pressing into higher occupations. Let us live in a hotel. The individual home takes too much out of a woman." Of course, the care of babies does not easily accord with hotel and club life. So the Ferrars have no children. But Jane is a leader in reforms. Her husband has given his life wholly to business. He is a silent, moody man, of whose real character she knows little. Her cousin, Nelly Ward, married about the same time. She was as able a woman as Jane, but with a sound foundation of common sense and that tender human sympathy which is the basis of character in the woman best beloved by men and by God. Her family besought her not to keep house. All the arguments recently urged against the old-fashioned home were brought forward. No servants, it was asserted, could be found who were not dishonest, incapable, and insolent. American women had gone into the shops and mills, feeling themselves debased by domestic service. Americans had in effect given up family life, as was proved by the countless hotels and skyscraping apartment houses in all of our cities. Nelly was daunted at first. "But," she argued presently, "the home and family life11was a blessing sent in the beginning to women by God. I don't believe He means us to give it up. I must try the experiment, not by general laws, but in my own individual way." Here, perhaps, was the secret of her success. She met all men and women, not as types or representatives of a class, but as individuals. The work of her house and kitchen was to her a fine art which she studied. The time which other women spent on lectures and "bridge" she gave to learning how to keep house, or to her husband, and her babies when they came. The cook and the maid were not to her a class to be held down in its place, but two friends and helpers. She knew all about their "folks" and homes. She found work for the cook's boy who had taken to drink, and when the maid's father was in the hospital she visited him and paid his bills. She has been a housekeeper now for many years. Some of her public-spirited friends wonder that she is able to keep up her happy home life. "She never has trouble with servants," they say. She laughs and says nothing. She never argues. She just goes ahead and does.