She has a profound faith in the value of mucilage as a substitute for glue, and hopefully attempts to mend china and furniture with it; but mucilage is as harmless as it is inefficient, and it is only on the rare occasions when it is used to mend the wheels of the clock that it does any permanent injury to anything.
It is doubtless the timidity of woman which restrains her mending instincts. She dreads the saw and the chisel as treacherous tools that inevitably inflict wounds on the user, and she dislikes hot glue owing to its proneness to burn unwary fingers. Moreover, she can never grasp the difference between a nail and a screw, and regards the latter as an absurd variety of nail which can not be driven with a hammer unless the wielder of the hammer has the muscles of a man.
Thus, for one reason or another, carpenter-work as practiced by woman is harmless and inexpensive, and she knows nothing of the remorse to which the man who owns an amateur tool chest and is not wholly hardened is a prey. Nothing more surely devastating than a man with a fondness for amateur carpentry is ever found in a respectable household. The reckless inebriate who throws all the furniture out of the window does perhaps an equal amount of injury, but he can not be said to be a feature of respectable households.
Comment