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174 have somebody to take care of his rooms. If he gets a housekeeper, to avoid scandal he must get the oldest and ugliest woman he can find. And servants and others victimize the bachelors terribly. Moreover, everybody living near such a man will regard him as a lunatic or an original, and treat him accordingly. The hand of society is raised against the man who tries to live alone in a house of his own — unless he be very rich. Sometimes five or six bachelors get together, as we have known them to do in the French quarter, furnish a house, hire a housekeeper, and live a sort of club-life by themselves. But if they should fall out, the whole arrangement would prove more disagreeable than all the combined afflictions common to furnished rooms and boarding-houses.

There is no consolation. To get a home, one must get rich or marry, and even then he may not be lucky enough to get it.