often the adviser, of her husband.  Your English woman of the same class prides herself rather on her total ignorance of business.  It is probable that in twenty years of married life she has not once visited the warehouse or the office where her husband earns the income which she spends.  She is ‘provided for without the sweet sense of providing.’  She sees her husband elated or depressed by things that have happened in the city; but to her the reasons of his hope or fear are not communicated, nor would she understand them if they were.  His mind speaks a language foreign to her; his daily operations in the city have for her only the remote interest of things that have happened in a foreign country, which appear too unreal to excite any sincere sympathy or apprehension.  Is this divided life good for either party?

Were some curious observer from another planet to arrive in London, I think few things would appear to him so extraordinary as a London suburb at noonday.  By ten o’clock in the morning at latest he would see it denuded of all its male inhabitants.  Like that fabulous realm of Tennyson’s Princess, it is a realm inhabited by women; and the only male voice left in the land is the voice of the milk-boy on his rounds, the necessary postman, and the innocuous grocer’s tout.  There is something of the ‘hushed seraglio’ in these miles of trim houses, from whose doors and windows only female faces look out.  An air of sensible bereavement lies upon the land.  Woman, deprived of her lord and natural complement, cuts but a poor figure anywhere, but nowhere so poor as in a wide realm populous with grass widows.  By what interests or avocations, or by what delinquency of duty the tedious hours are cheated, is not revealed to any male philosopher; but he is a poor observer who does not recognise something unnatural in this one-sided life.  A few miles away the loud Niagara of London runs swift, and the air vibrates with all the tumult of the strenuous life of man; but here the air is dead, unwinnowed by any clamorous wind, unshaken by any planetary motion.  I cannot think this narrow separated life good for woman, and I am surprised that in these days when woman claims equal privilege with man, she will submit to it.  In the act of getting a living she also suffers, and loses something of the power to live.  If the distraction of the city hurts the man she is not less injured by the torpor of the suburb.  Let a woman be never so intelligent and keenly wrought, a suburb will soon enfeeble her, and take the fine edge off her spirit.  Left to the sole society of nursemaids and cooks in her own house for many hours a day; to the companionship of women outside her house, whose conversation is mainly gossip about household difficulties; to the tame diversions of shopping at the nearest emporium; what power of interest in the larger things of life can be expected of her?  The suburb is her cloister, and she the dedicated bride of littleness.