suffers more, for he is no longer a guest in his own house, with all a guest’s prerogatives; he now belongs there, and must take the consequences.

Fortunately the professional men-about-the-house are in small minority, and so are their housekeepers, but all women have sometimes to experience the upheaval incident on a man’s vacation at home; whether father’s, or husband’s, or college brother’s, or son’s, the effect is always the same: the house stands on its head, and for two days it kicks up its heels and enjoys it, but after two weeks, two months, that is, on the removal of the exciting stimulus, it sinks to coma for the rest of the season. The different professions differ in their treatment of a holiday, except that all men at home on a vacation act like fish on land or cats in water, and expect their womenfolk either to help them pant, or help them swim. They seem to go out a great deal,—at least they are always clamoring to have their garments prepared for sorties, social or piscatorial,—and yet they always seem to be under heel. Some men on a home holiday tinker all day long, others bring with them a great many books which they never read, and the result in both cases is that house-keeping becomes a prolonged picking up. All men at home on a vacation eat a great deal more than other men, or than at other times; but with the sole exception of the anomalous academic, who is always concerned for his gastronomy, they will eat anything and enjoy it,—and say so. A man at home for his holidays is always vociferously appreciative. His happiness is almost enough to repay a woman for the noise he makes, and the mess; yet statistics would show that during any man’s home vacation the women of the house lose just about as many pounds as the man gains. But what are women for, or homes?

After all, you can have a house without a man in it if you are quite sure you want to, but you cannot have a home without one. You cannot make a home out of women alone, or men alone; you have to mix them. Still every woman must admit, and every man with as much sense as a woman, that it’s very hard to make a home for any man if he is always in it. Every honest front door must confess that it is glad to see its master go forth in the morning; but this is only because it is so much gladder to see him come back at night.

III

Old-Clothes Sensations

PEOPLE whom penury has never compelled in infancy or adolescence to wear other people’s clothes have missed a valuable lesson in social sympathy. In our journey from the period when we first strutted thoughtlessly in our Cousin Charles’s cast-off coat on to the time when we resented its misfit, and thence to that latest and best day when we could bestow our own discarded jacket on poor little Cousin Billy, we have successively experienced all the gradations of soul between pauper and philanthropist. Most of us are fortunate enough to put away other people’s clothes when we put away the rest of childhood’s indignities; but our early experiences should make us thoughtful of those who have no such luck, who seem ordained from birth to be all the world’s poor relations. In gift-clothes there is something peculiarly heart-searching both for giver and recipient.

This delicacy inherent in the present of cast-off suit or frock is due perhaps to the subtle clinging of the giver’s self to the serge or silk. It is a strong man who feels that he is himself in another man’s old coat. If an individuality is fine enough to be worth retaining, it is likely to be fine enough to disappear utterly beneath the weight of another man’s shoulders upon one’s own. Most of us would rather have our creeds chosen for us than our clothes. Most of us would rather select our own tatters than have another’s cast-off splendors thrust upon us. It is no light achievement, the living up to and into other people’s clothes. Clothes acquire so much personality from their first wearer,—adjust themselves to the swell of the chest, the quirk of the elbow, the hitch in the hip-joint,—that the first wearer always wears them, no matter how many times they may be given away. He is always felt to be inside, so that the second wearer’s ego is constantly bruised by the pressure resulting from two gentlemen occupying the same waistcoat.

Middle children are to be pitied for being condemned to be constantly made over out of the luckier eldest’s outgrown raiment. How can Tommy be sure he is Tommy, when he is always walking around in Johnny’s shoes? Or Polly, grown to girlhood, ever find her own heart, when all her life it has beaten under Anna’s pinafore?

The evil is still worse when the garments come from outside the family, for one may readily accept from blood-kin bounty which, bestowed by a stranger, would arouse a corroding resentment. This is because one can always revenge one’s self on one’s relatives for an abasement of gratitude by means of self-respecting kicks and pinches. A growing soul may safely wear his big brother’s ulster, but no one else’s; for there are germs in other people’s clothes,—the big bad yellow bacilli of covetousness. People give you their old clothes because they have new ones, and this fact is hard to forgive.

There may, of course, exist mitigating circumstances that often serve to solace or remove this basic resentment. To receive gown or hat or boots direct from the donor is degrading, but in proportion as they come to us through a lengthening chain of transferring hands the indignity fades out, the previous wearer’s personality becomes less insistent; until, when identification is an impossibility, we may even take pleasure in conjecturing who may have previously occupied our pockets, may even feel the pull of real friendliness toward the unknown heart that beat beneath the warm woolen bosom presented to us.

Further, the potential bitterness of the recipient is dependent on the stage of his racial development and the color of his skin. The Ethiopian prefers old clothes to new. The black cook would rather have her mistress’s cast-off frock than a new one, and the cook is therein canny. She trusts the correctness of the costume that her lady has chosen for herself, but distrusts the selection the lady might make for her maid. On assuming the white woman’s clothes, the black woman feels that she succeeds also to the white woman’s dignity. The duskier race stands at the same point of evolution with the child who falls upon the box of cast-off finery and who straightway struts about therein without thought of his own discarded independence.

I may be perceived to write from the point of view of one clothed in childhood out of the missionary box. Those first old clothes received were donned with gloating and glory; but later, in my teens,—that period so strangely composed for all of us out of spiritual shabbiness and spiritual splendor,—sensations toward the cast-off became uneasy, uncomfortable, at last unbearable. The sprouting personality resisted the impact of that other personality who had first worn my garments. I wanted raiment all my own, dully at first, then fiercely.

No one who has passed from a previous condition of servitude to the dignity of his own earnings will ever forget the pride of his first self-bought clothes. At last one is one’s self and belongs not to another man’s coat, or another woman’s gown. It is a period of expansion, of pride: when one’s clothes are altogether one’s own, one’s pauper days are done. But it is best for sympathy not to forget them, not only for the sake of the pauper, but for the sake of the plutocrat we are on the verge of becoming; for our sensations in regard to old clothes are about to enter a new phase; we are about to undergo the ordeal of being ourselves the donors of our own old clothes.

It was not alone for