Odd as the receipt may seem in the reading, the fritters are most palatable. In the country, where milk is plenty, they may be made of cream—unless, as is too often the case, the good wife will save all the cream for butter.
CONCERNING ALLOWANCES.
(Confidential—with John.)
I do not like that word “allowance.” It savors too much of a stipend granted by a lordling to a serf; a government pension to a beneficiary; the dole of the rich to the poor. But since it has crept into general use as descriptive of that portion of the wife’s earnings which she is permitted to disburse more or less at her discretion, we must take it as we find it.
Marriage is to a woman one of two things—licensed, and therefore honorable beggary, or, a copartnership with her husband upon fair and distinctly specified terms. When I spoke of the wife’s earnings just now, it was not with reference to moneys accumulated by work or investments outside of the home which she occupies with you and your children. We will set aside, if you please, the legal and religious fiction that you have endowed her with all—or half your worldly goods, and put still further from our consideration the sounding oaths with which you protested in the days of your wooing, that you cared nothing for pelf and lucre—Cupid’s terms for stocks, bonds and mortgages, houses and lands—except that you might cast them at her feet. If you recollect such figures of speech at all, it is with a laugh, good-humored, or shame-faced, and the plea that everybody talks in the same way in like circumstances; that pledges thus given are in no wise to be regarded as promissory notes. Hymen’s is a general court of bankruptcy so far as such obligations go. Your wife is a sensible woman, and never expected to take you at your word—at least, such hot and hasty words as those, in which you declared yourself to be the most abject of her slaves, and herself the empress of your universe, including the aforementioned stocks, mortgages, houses and lands, real and personal estate—all assets in esse and in posse.
Having cleared away, by a stroke of common sense, this gossamer, that like other cobwebs, is pretty while the dew of early morning impearls it, and only an annoyance afterward; particularly odious when it entangles itself about the lips and eyes of him who lately admired it—we will look at the question of the wife’s work and wages from a business point of view—pencil and paper in hand.
First, we will determine what should be the salary of a competent housekeeper; one who makes her employer’s interests her own; who rises up early and lies down late, and eats the bread of carefulness; who is not to be coaxed away by higher wages, and is never in danger of giving warning if her “feelings are hurt;” if the servants are insubordinate, or the master is given to fault-finding, and not always respectful to herself. It would be to your interest, were you a widower, you confess, to give this treasure two dollars a day—as women’s wages go. “And,” you add in a burst of manly confidence, “she would be cheap at that.” But we will put down her salary in round numbers, at $700 per annum.
Now comes the seamstress’ pay. Again, a “competent person,” one who is ever in her place; whose work-hours number fourteen out of the twenty-four, if her services are required by you or the children; whose needle is always threaded, her eye ever vigilant; with whom slighting and botching are things unknown by practice; who takes pride in seeing each of the household trig and tidy; who “seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands;” who is an adept in fine needlework as in plain sewing, and not a novice in dress-making; who, perchance, can “manage” boys’ clothes as well as girls—who will do it, of a certainty, if you explain that you cannot afford tailors’ bills for urchins under ten years of age; finally, who possesses that most valuable of arts for a poor man’s wife,
“To gar auld claes look a’maist as weel as new.”