When a wife is a good financial manager, she is the head of the house, whose reign is never questioned. "Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praiseth her," though the Book of Proverbs may be unknown. This financial independence of the wives of working men develops the spirit of independence and aggressiveness that so often disturbs and upsets the plans of the woman who would do them good, and is the cause of the charge of ingratitude that is often made against the women of the tenement-house regions. It is scarcely natural to develop gratitude for efforts made in the wrong direction. Poverty has its degrees, as has wealth. There are families living in tenements whose conditions represent wealth when contrasted with that of their neighbors. One fact remains. Both women do not need the same opportunities, the same help. The student of the management of wages in a tenement-house home rapidly acquires a spirit of humility. While everywhere there is waste, there are times when money seems to buy double the amount that the student thought possible. With the wage-earners' families, as with all others, the income buys that which is most desired by those spending it. Choice is the master of decision, even in necessities. What is needed in the wage-earner's family is that education, that opportunity for development that will make a choice of the highest things, those that will mean a body and mind so nourished and cared for that moral resistance is the available capital of every member of the family in time of need. CHAPTER IX. HOME STANDARDS. The world knows two aspects of involuntary poverty: The one inseparable from degradation; the other picturesque, appealing to the emotions, and giving a field for the play of sympathetic activity that frequently neglects to note the results it attains. There are few who discern that poverty is a comparative term, and these do not use the word in its financial sense wholly. Those who know intimately the struggling, up-growing poor know that the rich can never give the exquisite expression to love that life at this level makes possible. Who would dream when looking at the Hercules, with clothes and hands soiled by his daily labor, that he is the tender nurse of wife and baby; that he is hurrying to a house cared for with joy. He will wash dishes, cook, scrub the floor, walk the baby to sleep, and coddle and pet a wife who from sheer loneliness and worry over work undone may be the harder to please and quiet. All this, and perhaps, almost certainly, not once will any terms of endearment be heard, and, strange as it may seem, no kiss given. How one rebels and rejoices that love can be thus expressed!