"It depends upon what you mean by society; it's a very general and inexact term. If you mean formal dinners, dances, parties, receptions, and all that, the lightest housekeeping would distract from the duties to it; but if you mean congenial friends willing to come in for tea in the afternoon, or to a simple lunch, or not impossibly a dinner, light housekeeping is not incompatible with a conscientious recognition of society's claims. I think of two ladies, sisters, one younger and one older than the other, who keep house not lightly, but in its full weight of all the meals, for their father and brother, and yet are most gracefully and most acceptably in the sort of society which Jane Austen says is, if not good, the best: the society of gifted, cultivated, travelled, experienced, high-principled people, capable of respecting themselves and respecting their qualities wherever they find them in others. These ladies do not pretend to 'entertain,' but their table is such that they are never afraid to ask a friend to it. In a moment, if there is not enough or not good enough, one of them conjures something attractive out of the kitchen, and you sit down to a banquet. The sisters are both of that gentle class of semi-invalids whose presence in our civilization enables us to support the rudeness of the general health. They employ aesthetically the beautiful alleviations with which science has rescued domestic drudgery from so much of the primal curse; it is a pleasure to see them work; it is made so graceful, so charming, that you can hardly forbear taking hold yourself." "But you do forbear," we interposed; "and do you imagine that their example is going to prevail with the great average of impecunious American housewives, or sisters, or daughters?" "No, they will continue to 'keep a girl' whom they will enslave to the performance of duties which they would be so much better for doing themselves, both in body and mind, for that doing would develop in them the hospitable soul of those two dear ladies. They will be in terror of the casual guest, knowing well that they cannot set before him things fit to eat. They have no genius for housekeeping, which is one with home-making: they do not love it, and those ladies do love it in every detail, so that their simple flat shines throughout with a lustre which pervades the kitchen and the parlor and the chamber alike. It is the one-girl household, or the two-girl, which makes living costly because it makes living wasteful; it is not the luxurious establishments of the rich which are to blame for our banishment to the mythical cheapness of Europe." We were not convinced by the eloquence which had overheated our friend, and we objected: "But those ladies you speak of give their whole lives to housekeeping, and ought cheapness to be achieved at such an expense?"