It is largely a game of bluff, as it is played in thousands of small households. It is a game, also, of consequences, as I shall have to show. It consists in keeping up appearances, in going one better than one’s neighbor whenever possible, and in making a claim to a higher rung of the social ladder than is justified by the husband’s income and rank in life. It is the creed of snobbishness. For this creed everything is sacrificed--contentment of mind, the pleasure of life, the little children of life. In many flats of Intellectual Mansions, and even in the small houses of the “well-to-do” suburbs, children do not enter into the scheme of things. The “babies have been left out of the business.” For people who are keeping up appearances to the last penny of their income cannot afford to be burdened by babies. Besides, they interfere seriously with social ladder-climbing, drag down a married couple of the younger generation to the domestic squalor of their parents’ early life. The husband cannot bear the thought that his wife should have to make beds in the morning and mend stockings in the evening, and wheel out a perambulator in the park. It is so very “low down.” The husband wants to save his wife from all this domestic drudgery. He wants her to look pretty in the frocks he buys her. He wants her to wear more expensive frocks than any other woman in his circle of friends. He likes to hear his friends say, “How charming your wife looks to-night, old man!” and to hear elderly ladies say to his wife, “What a beautiful gown you are wearing, my dear!” He is working hard now in order to furnish his wife’s wardrobe--not only for her pleasure, but for his pride. After the first romance of love, ambition comes to gild reality. He is ambitious to build up a beautiful little home. The furniture with which they started married life on the hire system has been bought and paid for, and is now replaced here and there by “genuine antiques.” He puts some good prints on his walls and buys some water-color sketches, and becomes in a small way a patron of the arts. It is pleasant during one of his wife’s evening At Homes to take a guest on one side and say “What do you think of that? Pretty good, eh? It’s an original, by Verdant Green, you know.”