This moral effect is what makes the housing problem so serious.
It leads to an outward show not balanced by an ability to maintain an inner life in harmony.

It leads to an attempt to carry on a four-servant house with two servants, or a three servant establishment with one.
Lack of study and experience leads the family living in the suburbs, in one of the worst legacies of the past, to attempt the same style as friends maintain in a lately built apartment house, without in the least understanding wherein the difference lies.
From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Maine to Texas, comes the same dull and sullen roar of domestic unrest.

Lack of faithful service is causing the abandonment of the family home, and the fear of the obstacles in the way of establishing new ones threatens the whole social fabric.
The housewife is inclined to connect this state of things almost entirely with food preparation, and is prone to fancy that if eating could be abolished peace would return.
The trouble goes much deeper, however, even to the foundations.

The nineteenth-century house is not suited to twentieth-century needs.

In other words, lack of adaptation to present conditions of the houses we live in is a large factor in the prevailing domestic discontent.