In his business a man must be decent, or he loses credit.

In masculine ignorance of the immutable law that in dislodging dirt some must cling to the garments and person of the toiler, he sets down his wife's altered appearance to indifference to his happiness.

She may have labored from an early breakfast to a late dinner to make his home comfortable and tasteful; into each of the dishes served up with secret pride for his consumption, may have gone a wealth of love and earnest desire that would have set up ten poets in sonnets and madrigals.

Because her hands are roughened and her complexion muddied by her work, and--in the knowledge that dishes are to be washed and the table re-set for breakfast, and the kitchen cleared up after he has been regaled--she has slipped on a dark frock in which she was wont to receive him on rainy evenings--he falls into a brown and cynical study, which dishonors his wife only a little more than it disgraces himself and human nature.

"Time was"-- so runs his musing--"when she thought it worth her while to take pains to look pretty.