The superintendent, part owner, and the slave of all this magnificence was his wife.  She was her own housekeeper, and employed, besides the coachman, whose business was in the stables and upon his box, five servants.  There were twenty-five rooms in the palatial house, giving to each servant five to be kept in the spick-and-span array demanded by the master’s position and taste.  As a matter of course something was neglected in every department, the instinct of self-preservation being innate and cultivated in Abigail, Phyllis and Gretchen, “Jeems” and “Chawls.”  Even more as a matter of course, the nominal mistress supplemented the deficiencies of her aids.

The house was as present and forceful a consciousness with her as his Dulcinea with David Copperfield at the period when the “sun shone Dora, and the birds sang Dora, and the south wind blew Dora, and the wild flowers were all Doras to a bud.”  No snail ever carried her abode upon her back more constantly than our poor rich woman the satin-lined, hot-aired and plate-windowed stone pile, with her.  The lines that criss-crossed her forehead, and channeled her cheeks, and ran downward from the corners of her mouth, were hieroglyphics standing in the eyes of the initiated for the baleful legend—­

“HOUSE AND HOUSEKEEPING.”

When she drove abroad in her luxurious chariot, behind high-stepping bays, jingling with plated harness, or repaired in the season to seashore or mountain, she was striving feebly to push away the tons of splendid responsibility from her brain.

One day she gave over the futile attempt.  Something crashed down upon and all around her, and everything except inconceivable misery of soul was a blank.

Expensive doctors diagnosed her case as nervous prostration.  When she vanished from the eyes of her public, and a high-salaried housekeeper, a butler, a nursery governess and an extra Abigail took her place and did half her work in the satin-lined shell out of which she had crept, maimed and well-nigh murdered, it was announced that she was “under the care of a specialist at a retreat.”

A retreat!  Heaven save and pardon us for making such homes part and parcel and a necessity of our century and our land!

Our Rich Man’s Wife never left it until she was borne forth into the securer refuge of the narrow house that needed none of her care-taking.  Upon the low green thatch lies heavily the shadow of a mighty monument that, to the satirist’s eye, has a family likeness to the stone pile which killed her.

The Farmer’s Wife was born and bred among the prairies, out of sight of which she had traveled but once, and that on her wedding journey.  She came back from the brief outing to take possession of “her own house”—­prideful phrase to every young matron.