JULY, 1913 INTENSIVE LIVING REFLECTIONS ON THE WELL-TO-DO WOMAN'S PROBLEM BY CORNELIA A. P. COMER SAID Honoria casually, 'When I was in town yesterday, I went to see Adelaide in her new house.' The others looked up alertly, Martha from her darning, Grace from her Irish crochet. was but a winter's guest in Honoria's home, whose hospitable brown gables, low and wide-spreading, were visible beyond the cypress hedge encircling Martha's cottage. 'It is a good-looking mansion. She 'Oh, really? And how did you like had a capable architect. The building the house?' Honoria hesitated, looking to the wide view for clarification. The three sat on a cottage-verandah in the foothills of Southern California, one February day. In front of them the landscape ran, laughing, down-hill to the sea. Spread beneath them like a map were thirty miles of town and country: orange orchards brave with fruit; eucalyptus groves appealing to the sky; friendly roofs inclosed in deep-sheltering trees; great open spaces where the wind moved free; round-topped hills, green near at hand (for the rains had come and gone thus early), changing to a dusky blue out yonder where the bright Pacific flashed at the end of the long, delightful view. For love of this prospect Martha had lately left steep, sturdy hills, brown brooks, elmshaded streets and old friends, girding at herself as she did so. Honoria had lived here many years, while Grace VOL. 112-NO. 1 is Tudor, consistent, graceful, well proportioned. For two people it is a very large house indeed, but it is a good house, and I see perfectly how Adelaide means it to express the idea of dignified comfortable living. The decorator was not bad of his kind, either.' 'All this sounds like praise,' said Grace, 'yet I feel that you are keeping something back. What is the matter with Adelaide's house?' Again Honoria hesitated. 'It seems ungracious to find fault with such a perfectly worthy performance, yet I came away chilled and uncomfortable, almost unhappy, indeed. Thinking about the matter on the way home, it became clear to me at last that the house is too large for Adelaide's personality. You know how perfectly she pervaded that old house of hers. Old-fashioned, in some respects inconvenient, with far less perfect fittings, it still was thoroughly delightful, for |