£ _s.__d._ House-rent in London 80 0 0 Rates and taxes 20 0 0 Repairs to house and furniture 30 0 0 Two servants’ wages and keep 90 0 0 Keep of self and wife, _at least_ 75 0 0 Clothes for wife and pocket-money 50 0 0 Clothes for husband, including his daily luncheon and City journey 70 0 0 Coals 6 0 0 Life insurance 27 0 0 Summer outing 12 10 0 Washing 16 0 0 ----------- 476 10 0 Leaving: the magnificent sum of 24_l._ 10_s._ to cover doctors’ bills and the thousand and one incidental expenses which are always cropping up, to say nothing of amusement. One could hardly rise to the upper boxes on 500_l._ a year if one must live in town and have appearances to keep up as well. It is better at first, if the income is very small, to live in the suburbs. There are not so many temptations to spend money, and there would not be much going out. In London of course, the going out is endless; there must be cabs, new gloves, flowers, and the hundred and one extras that carry off one’s money, and two servants are a _sine quâ non_. If the suburbs are selected, cabs and evening gloves, &c., need not be legislated for; one servant could do the work; and the house-rent and taxes would come to 50_l._ instead of 100_l._; but there would be the husband’s season-ticket to consider, and furthermore the intense dulness that is the wife’s portion, for suburban residents are not hospitable; they are, most of them, not very well off, for of course all rich people fly to London; they are mutually suspicious of each other’s _bona fides_, and are, moreover, engrossed as a rule in their domestic duties, and when the husband returns from town he is not only tired with his work, but with the added railway journey; he usually hankers after his garden in the summer and his arm-chair by the fire in the winter, and does not care to go out, more especially as he judges from his own feelings in the matter, and is quite sure his host wishes him at home in bed quite as much as he wishes himself there.