“It’s dreadful, I suppose,” piped the youngling of the long-suffering band on the way home from the funeral. “But it ought to be some comfort that we won’t be obliged to have rice pudding three times a week any more.”
Faithful Elizabeth had her epitaph.
Nothing is more solemnly and sadly sure in this rushing age than that he who does not keep up with it will be thrown down and trampled out of sight. It is a trifle, apparently, when a woman tabooes oil in salad dressing because she “has never been used to putting it in,” when she thinks mint sauce a “trashy” accompaniment to roast lamb, and “won’t hear of hot sauce with cold pudding,” or whipped cream as an accompaniment to ice-cold raw tomatoes. When the vegetable dishes must all be set on the table with the meat, “as she has always had them,” and lettuce be cut up and dressed in the kitchen at the cook’s convenience, instead of being served, crisp and cool, from the deft fingers of some member of the family who is “up in salads.”
Each protest is a symptom of decadence which is wilful, not inevitable. She has stopped learning because she has “stopped.” In time, mental muscles become stiff, but disuse is the cause of the change.
“I account that day lost in which I have learned no new thing,” said an aged sage.
Our housewife may lay the saying to heart. If there be a better way than hers of doing anything—from making pickles to giving a wedding supper—she should be on the alert to possess herself of it. It is not true that it is easier for young people to keep themselves and their houses abreast of the times than it is for their elders. The first step that counts in the downward road is the tendency not to take any step at all. To stand still is to be left.
Many who believe that they cultivate the seeing eye, the hearing ear, and the willing, receptive mind, live and die without learning the great truth that the mighty thing we call Life is made up of minute matters. They see and admire the coral reef that heaves a back a mile long out of the surf, and give never a thought to the coral builders.
A man who thinks much and observes much, once told me that one essential difference between a man’s work and a woman’s is that he grasps general principles while she gives her attention to details.
A man, according to this authority, is an impressionist painter, handling his brush boldly, dashing in broad effects of light and shadow, while a woman finishes each object carefully, sometimes, after the manner of the Dutch school of painting, showing the very hairs upon the brawny peasant’s arm.
(I may be excused for saying, in passing, that, being a woman, I founded upon his general principle the particular moral that one sex supplements the other, and that the Creator meant the work of the world to be done by them in concert.)