A splendid training.

And how expert does she become in her marketing! Such a thing as waste is absolutely unknown in the tiny sphere of home of which she is the centre and the sun. The bones from her miniature joints of beef and mutton are not cast away until they are white and smooth from boiling and reboiling, the stock they yield being skilfully made up into tempting soups and savoury dishes of macaroni. There is splendid training for the future housewife in all this; not only in the matter of food itself, but in the diligent industry needed to combine its preparation with the day’s work, and the practical knowledge of what such work of preparation involves. The kindest and most considerate mistresses are those who know exactly how much time and trouble it takes to produce certain results.

Unfortunate man.

Contrast the girl-bachelor with her peer of the helpless sex. Look at the dingy lodging-house break- fast-table of the poor clerk. Do you see the crushed and soiled tablecloth, the cup and saucer rather wiped than washed, the fork with suspicious lack of clear outline along its prongs, hatefully reminiscent of previous meals, the knife powdered with brown from recent contact with the knifeboard, and the food itself untempting to the palate and not very nutritious to the system.

“Cooking comes by nature.”

Cooking comes almost by nature to the bachelor-girl. With a good stove-lamp, a frying-pan, a chafing- dish, and a boilerette, with a saucepan or two and a kettle, she has an all-sufficing batterie de cuisine. The wonders she can work with these are known to many of her friends, and even those with comfortable establishments of their own are often fain to confess that her cookery invites them as the achievements of the queen of their kitchen often fail to do.

“How it strikes a contemporary.”

And in many other essentials the girl-bachelor has the advantage of the ordinary young man. Hear what a contemporary has to say:—“The average youth, from the time he leaves school, wants unlimited tobacco for his pipes and cigarettes, and often runs to several cigars a day; he seldom passes many hours without a glass of something—wine, spirits, or beer, according to his tastes or company, and he wants a good deal of amusement of the sing-song or cheap music-hall kind, to say nothing of much more expensive meals. Tobacco would not cost him much if he were content with a little smoke when the day’s work was over, instead of indulging in perpetual cigarettes. The girl has none of these expenses; she often economises, and gives herself healthy exercise by walking at least part of the way to her occupation in fine weather; she does not smoke; she rarely eats or drinks between meals, though she may nibble a bit of chocolate, which, after all, is wholesome food; her mid-day meal seldom costs more than sixpence, and she is glad after working hours to get home, where she enjoys the welcome change of reading a book and making and mending her clothes, concocting a new hat, and so forth.”

It is a healthy, happy, often a merry, cheery life; and if the girl-bachelor often sighs to be rich, the wish is not allowed to generate discontent, but serves to arouse a wholesome ambition which may lead, in time, to the realisation of the wish. And who so happy, then, as the matured and cultured woman who reaps where she has sown, and finds, in the fullest development of her faculties the real meaning of the highest happiness, viz., living upward and outward to the whole height and breadth and depth of her innate possibilities.