Husbands are far too apt to say and think that the life of a woman is a mere giddy whirl of frocks and gaiety, that all the time he is ‘toiling in the City,’ or doing the equivalent of that in some other walk in life, she is airily fluttering from flower to flower, extracting all the sweetness she can out of it, and bitterly resents it should she be tired in the evening, or require a little lively talk, instead of hours of contemplation of a sleeping countenance, at which perchance she looks sadly, and wonders if she ever really did think it so good-looking, as she seems to remember she once did, in some far-off existence long since dead. But have men the smallest idea of what a never-ceasing, uninteresting work a woman’s far too often is? Men never can be acquainted with or realise--bless them!--the thousand worries a woman knows all too well; the abject fears for her children that always haunt her, the dread that Tommy’s whine may mean scarlet fever, or that Trixy’s temper indicates measles; the impatience with which she would fain greet the daily details of food and drink, and which she has to smother; the sordid arrangements with butcher and baker, and the endless trouble she has to keep the house nice, the children well, and the expenses down to the lowest sum she can possibly manage with, and all this is done within the walls of one house. A man’s work takes him far afield; he rubs his intellect against those of hundreds of other people daily. He goes to his ‘toil’ through amusing streets which always vary, and he has the grand excitement of being paid for his ‘toil,’ while the ordinary woman works on and on ceaselessly without pay, sometimes without thanks; and handicapped by indifferent health and nervous dread for her babies that no man--no _man_, I repeat, with a fine accent of scorn on the noun--can ever comprehend, much less appreciate in the least; gets through an amount of real positive labour, an account of which might astonish the husband, but which he would most certainly not believe in were it written out in plain words for his perusal, and placed before him. Of course, I am not writing about the ‘upper ten,’ about whose domestic arrangements I know nothing, and which, judging from the papers, are not always as successful as they might be. Here, no doubt, ladies spend their days in the ‘fluttering’ spoken of above, and may not earn their keep--to put the matter a little coarsely--but we ordinary folk cannot do much fluttering, even if we would; and I can but hope that men will realise what a woman’s work means for the future, and will take care she is really nursed and guarded, in a manner the husband alone can see is done, at a time when the brain should be allowed to rest, as well as the rest of the body.