To begin with, it is a pandering, pure and simple, to the baser part of human nature--the desire to out-rival your neighbour, to be able to soar over him at any price; and more, it is both hypocritical and immoral. Hypocritical, because it is pure pretence to a station which has no means to support it; and immoral, because you cannot afford to pay for it, and thereby suffering is entailed somewhere and somehow. How many of us number among our acquaintances (if not absolutely guilty ourselves), persons who, possessed of a small and limited income, live in a large house, the rent of which is a kind of sword of Damocles hanging over them for ever? You know them by their hunted, eager, restless look, which tells of inward dispeace, of worry too great almost to be borne. Their servants do not stay long, perhaps because the larder of the big house is kept very bare, and comfort is sacrificed to outside show. They never have anything to give away, and their excuse is that they do not believe in indiscriminate charity. And they look back with a painful longing, never expressed, however, to the days when they lived at peace in a little house, and had enough and to spare for man and beast, and a penny for the beggar at the gate. The big house is but one thing; the struggle to keep up appearances is observed in many other ways--in expensive and not always efficient education of the children, in party-giving, extravagant dress, frequent going out of town, and many others too numerous to mention. And what, after all, is the advantage of it? Is there any advantage gained? You may succeed in exciting in the breast of your neighbour a bitter envy which will probably find expression in some such remark as this--"I only hope it is all paid for." And you never will have any peace of mind, without which the outward trappings are but a mockery. Oh, let us be simpler! Let us at least not pretend to be what we are not. In a word, let us not try to humbug ourselves and the world at large. [Illustration] IX. _MOTHERHOOD._ It is a great theme, which I approach with fear and trembling; yet--is the home complete without the child? Can even an unpretentious book of this sort be written without some attempted treatment of the same?