If your mother merely directs the affairs of her house and the details are carried out by others, watch how she does it, for this may be the way in which you will keep house; and persuade her to let you try it, sometime when she is to be absent. In this case there will be some one else in the house from whom you will need to take a few lessons. It will perhaps be a housekeeper, or a very trusted maid. Make friends with her and ask her questions. If she sees you want to learn and not to criticize she will become the most delighted, flattering teacher you ever dreamed of. If your mother does part or all of the housework it will probably be one of your appointed duties to assist her. If it should happen, as is sometimes the case, that you are not required to help with the housework, then be a woman, and not a lap dog, and ask to help. In the proper story-book, a mother's response to such a request would be an affectionate answer and much patient teaching, and I think, in many, many cases, that is the reply a daughter does receive. But just suppose that you are one of the other cases. I can imagine a variety of answers you might get to "May I help?" One of them might be, "Go out of the kitchen, you'll spoil your clothes"; and others might be, "Don't bother me, I'm busy," or "Don't interrupt," or, "I'd rather do it myself than put up with your clumsiness." The first thing to do when one gets an answer like this is to go away. The second is according to temperament; if you feel hurt and discouraged, then, try not to, or if you feel that your responsibility is ended by the refusal of your offer, then don't think that; it isn't true. Think rather, that you may have offered just at the wrong moment--you will find when you begin to keep house yourself that there are a good many wrong moments--or that there may have been some simpler thing you could have done which would have been a greater help. We might also consider the possibility that our way of helping has not been quite agreeable on some former occasion. Perhaps, alas, we may be clumsy, or we may be slow, or we may be more nuisance than help just at first. After we have gone away and thought ourselves quiet, then we must do that most difficult and heroic of things--try again to help the person by whom we have been rebuffed. You see I speak entirely of your side in this matter. That is because neither you nor I may be permitted to pass judgment on your mother. She is like some one about whom we have read a short story, we only know one little period of her life and only a few of her thoughts and feelings even then. She must always remain a bit of a mystery to us, because we can never know very much about what happened before we were born.