If he is to do most of the public work of the world, he must be allowed to be a trifle impervious to the need for the private adjustments which are, strictly speaking, in his province. He will be excused, even profusely visited with thanks, if he show sympathy and gratitude. Who knows if the English wife gets enough of these commodities, since she will seldom confess to their deficiency? That her deserts are great no Englishman will deny, more than ever since the war, which saw poignant anxiety, intensity of nervous strain, every kind of economic difficulty and an incalculable increase in the coefficient of domestic friction added to her normal lot. She bore it all with courage, neither losing her presence of mind nor diminishing her dignity; and though some hastily assumed and badly stitched matrimonial mantles may have shown the strain of the violent disruption during periods of the war, the majority showed what very serviceable garments in time of stress they really were, capable of almost infinite elasticity without the straining of a fibre, warming him in the camp and her in her lonely bed. During the war the English wife kept the English home going, and at all times it is she who is the centre of the English home. This fact alone would give her a unique position among wives, for the English home is unique. If the man maintains it, the woman gives it its peculiar character, and the character is one which at once impresses itself upon all foreign observers. What the Englishwoman preserves, what she warms, one might almost say, with her blood, is not a dining-room for her husband, a nursery for her children, a drawing-room for herself and a sleeping place for them all; it is not even only a focus for purely family radiations to concentrate themselves upon; still less is it just a background to set off the more agreeable side of life, carefully concealing the obscure and dusty delvings that make it possible. All these elements come into it, but there is much more. It is the symbol of British hospitality, that spring of unsuspected warmth in a traditionally cold nation, which guards its privacy fiercely that it may share it without embarrassment. There is no stiffness in its welcome, no constraint in its entertainment: that its guests should for a moment forget their guesthood is its wish and its triumph. In this triumph the woman has the greater share. However much her husband may have invited, it is she who entertains. Her husband’s friendships are to that extent in her keeping, for the masculine link that he has strained in marrying cannot be reforged by his own good fellowship alone.