The lady laughed and said: No. So I said: Were the children, then? She answered again: No. And when she noticed my aston-ishment she said: It is the long soirées that have kept me from seeing them. Then I understood her answer and knew that the green tables had left her no spare time in which to see her children. She would not return home until a late hour of the night, to find the two boys asleep and her young daughter still out of the house with a troop of her girlfriends—and her men friends as well. And the lady sleeps drained of strength, for the effort and attention she has spent, and the money she has squandered, at the green table have wearied her eyelids and dragged fatigue into her thoughts and her nerves; so she surrenders to a long slumber that does not return her to wake-fulness until a late hour of the day. She rises to find the children gone from the house to their schools and her husband gone off to his work, to return likewise at late hours of the night. His day is for work and his money for banquets, wine, and idle play. And the wife—with no one to watch over her and no companion to cheer her life—plunges in her own turn to avenge herself on her husband by finding company at the green tables and finding companions among friends.

So I say to myself: What delusions!! Is it true that this family is happy? The husband finds his ease only among night-revelers and addicts; the wife, forgotten, takes her revenge and seeks her ease outside the house; and the young girl walks without guidance—no tenderness from a father, no direction from a mother—and no doubt she sees in her mother the example fit to be followed, so she seeks her happi-ness in her own particular way.

And these two boys—who cares for them? Who watches over their affairs? They are at a stage of life full of danger. And this great house—who manages its affairs, orders its budget, and supervises its workings, its income and its outlay? Everything in it is in the hands of the servants. The servants run the house, raise the children, deal

with the husband, and keep him company in the hours when the master of the house misses his wife and feels his loneliness.

And if you listen to the husband, he talks on at length, telling you in detail of his financial worries and of his shares in companies exposed every hour to violent economic shocks; and he complains to you of the poor state of health he suffers—for addiction has bequeathed weak-ness to his nerves, and excess in the pursuit of pleasures has bred in his frame countless kinds of disorder; and the wife's demands, her extravagance in spending on her jewels, her gowns, and her perfumes, and her continual losses at the gaming tables have troubled his mind and made of him a man weary of life and resentful of woman.

Then you listen to the wife, and she pours out to you complaints for which you could never have understood a cause, had you not been listening to a striking lady who is, in the estimation of some, of notable place and high rank:

She is perpetually preoccupied; she has no talk except of the state of health to which she has come in these days—her blood pressure, rising and falling, disturbs her rest and demands

constant medical consultations. She finds nothing in her program of engagements to allow her the enjoyment of a little rest. Her gilded notebook, with its exquisitely fine pen, is full of appointments; her women friends and men friends, devoted to her, pursue her with invitations. Now she is angry because the husband is very forgetful, excessively dis-tracted from house and children by his business and his appoint-ments; now she is lamenting because the maidservants have today become the rulers of the houses, no one of them dis-tinguished from the mistress of the house in anything. Through this impudence and this defiance, theirs is the word of command and prohibition in every matter. One of them will flirt with the master of the house or with the son, and no modesty restrains her, no decorum checks her; and if the lady calls her to account for it, she threatens and menaces and gives warning that she will leave the house, and the lady is then obliged to submit.

Then the lady runs on—cut-ting off your every right to speak—about the dressmakers who respect no appointment; and you gather after that that what Paris has decreed in fashions for this year obliges

Vicks VapoRub: It Fights Colds Two Ways

A gentle rub that fights colds in two ways

Your child will get relief in two ways when you rub his chest and neck with Vicks VapoRub at bedtime. This gentle rub releases vapors that are inhaled, easing the cold, relieving the pains of the throat, and calming the cough... And like any hot poultice, Vicks VapoRub relieves the tightness and pain of the chest. This double action puts an end to many kinds of cold.

Vicks VapoRub

"For the gentle rub"

VICKS VAPORUB

1 – Inhaling the medicated vapors

2 – Warming the chest like a poultice