Another thing I disapprove of is placing the household books week by week or month by month under the husband’s inspection; it leads to endless jars and frets, and discussions; therefore, having talked matters over once and for all, discuss money no more until you require additions to your allowance as the family increases; or can do with less; only know always how matters are going in business, so as to increase or retrench in a manner suitable, should circumstances alter. Domestic matters must, of course, be discussed now and again between husband and wife; but a sensible woman keeps these subjects in the background, and no more troubles her husband with the price of butter, or the cook’s delinquencies, than he does his wife over the more intimate details of his office, which he keeps for his clerks and his partners generally; while the day’s papers, the book on hand, people one has seen, are all far more interesting things than Maria’s temper, Jane’s breakages, or than the grocer’s bill, which, if higher than it ought to be, is Angelina’s own fault, and can only be altered by herself, and not by worrying Edwin. Common-sense housekeeping can only be done if the eyes be constantly open to see and the ears to hear. Waste must never be allowed. No servant should be kept who wastes, and if there be no dust-bin, save for cinders, no pig’s tub, no man calling at the door for bottles, and, above all, if there be a mistress who is always on the alert to use anyone else’s experience, housekeeping need be nothing of a bugbear, and can be done at one quarter the price that it usually costs. But most girls marry in perfect ignorance of everything save the plot of the last novel, the music of the last opera, the fashion of the last dress, and undertake duties they neither care for nor mean to understand, seeing nothing beyond the wedding finery, which is far too often an occasion of almost criminal display, and that must indeed appear a mockery to the poor bride, who contemplates her foolish wedding dress and wishes profoundly she had the money it cost her. The great curse now of English households is this seeming to be what you are not, this wretched pretending of 400_l._ to be 800_l._; the shirking of work, domestic details, and common-sense housekeeping that characterises the bride of this day, who only wants to enjoy herself and spend a little more, see a little more gaiety than the last bride did, and who sees nothing holy in the name of wife, only a mere emancipation from the schoolroom; who wants to decorate a house, not make a home; and who sees in her children, not human souls to train for time and for eternity, but pretty dolls to dress, to attract attention, or tiresome objects to be got rid of at school at the earliest opportunity.