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The worthy souls were, I was told, inkyos; a social, or rather unsocial state, which in their case may be rendered unwidowed dowagers; since, in company with their husbands, they had renounced all their social titles and estates. Their daughters-in-law now did the domestic drudgery, while they devoted their days thus to sport.
While the troubadours and minnesingers had been singing at the courts of Angevine kings and Hohenstauffen emperors, of counts of Toulouse and dukes of Austria; a new civilization, a new political and social system, had gradually been developing in the free burghs of Italy; a new life entirely the reverse of the life of feudal countries. The Italian cities were communities of manufacturers and merchants, into which only gradually, and at the sacrifice of every aristocratic privilege and habit, a certain number of originally foreign feudatories were gradually absorbed. Each community consisted of a number of mercantile families, equal before the law, and illustrious or obscure according to their talents or riches, whose members, instead of being scattered over a wide area like the members of the feudal nobility, were most often gathered together under one roof sons, brothers, nephews, daughters, sisters and daughters-in-law, forming a hierarchy attending to the business of factory or counting-house under the orders of the father of the family, and to the economy of the house-under the superintendence of the mother; a manner of living at once business-like and patriarchal, expounded pounded by the interlocutors in Alberti's "Governo della Famiglia," and which lasted until the dissolution of the commonwealths and almost to our own times. Such habits imply a social organization, an intercourse between men and women, and a code of domestic morality the exact opposite to those of feudal countries. Here, in the Italian cities, there are no young men bound to loiter, far from their homes, round the wife of a military superior, to whom her rank and her isolation from all neighbours give idleness and solitude. The young men are all of them in business, usually with their own kinsfolk; not in their employer's house, but in his office; they have no opportunity of seeing a woman from dawn till sunset. The women, on their side, are mainly employed at home: the whole domestic arrangement depends upon them, and keeps their hands constantly full; working, and working in the company of their female relatives and friends. Men and women are free comparatively little, and then they are free all together in the same places; hence no opportunities for tête-
There were the old men who lived with their married sons and daughters-in-law or married daughters and sons-in-law. Then there were the old men who lived in the Grant Home for Aged Gentlemen. You saw its fine red-brick façade through the trees at the edge of the Park. And the slogan of these first was: "My son and my da'ter they wouldn't want me to live in any public Home. No, sirree!
Daughters-in-law, in the presence of their husbands' mothers and fathers, rebuke and chastise servants and maids, and summoning their husbands lecture and rebuke them. Sires, with great care, seek to keep sons in good humour, or dividing through fear their wealth among children, live in woe and affliction.
"I am afraid we don't have prayers at night, my dear. We must resume them in the morning, now Raymond and Julius are come." Poor Anne looked all the whiter, and only mumbled out a few answers to the kind counsels lavished upon her. Mrs. Poynsett was left to think over her daughters-in-law. Lady Rosamond did not occupy her much.
Then what? . . . . . Why, then come a crowd of petty unforeseen troubles, like the following: Is it a petty or a profound trouble? I knew not; it is profound for your sons-in-law or daughters-in-law, but exceedingly petty for you. "Petty!
Philip's father and mother belonged to this type; the juices of their natures were not dried up. They received Ruey with open arms, and followed her about with their eyes, apparently fearing she would vanish as unexpectedly as she had appeared "Philip's wife" caring enough about them to come so far to see them in the middle of winter, all alone, too not many daughters-in-law like that.
While in Moab, both his sons married Moabitish women; and, in process of time, Elimelech and his sons all three died, leaving their respective widows destitute. Under these circumstances, the famine being now over in Judah, Naomi determined to return thither, and advised her daughters-in-law to return each to the house of her father.
Occasionally some vision of the past floated through her drowsy brain. She had lived in that residence for over forty years. She had brought up eleven children and two husbands there. She had coddled thirty-five grand-children there, and given instruction to some half-dozen daughters-in-law. She had known midnights when she could scarcely move in that residence without disturbing somebody asleep.
For, let the old gentry disclaim it as they may, mere wealth, derived from whatever source, will sooner reach their level than poor antiquity, or the rarest refinement of personal worth; although, to be sure, the oldest of them will sooner give to the rich their sons or their daughters to wed, to love if they can, to have children by, than they will yield a jot of their ancestral preeminence, or acknowledge any equality in their sons or daughters-in-law.
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