IV

She is an amateur at her business, you say. Well, perhaps she is. But

who brought her up to be an amateur? Are you not content to carry on

the ancient tradition? As you meditate, and you often do meditate,

upon that infant daughter of yours now sleeping in her cot, do you

dream of giving her a scientific education in housekeeping, or do you

dream of endowing her with the charms that music and foreign languages

and physical grace can offer? Do you in your mind's eye see her

cannily choosing beef at the butcher's, or shining for your pleasure

in the drawing-room?

And then Mrs. Omicron is, perhaps, not so much of an amateur as you

assume. People learn by practice. Is there any reason in human nature

why a complex machine such as a house may be worked with fewer

breakdowns than an office or manufactory? Harness your imagination

once more and transfer to your house the multitudinous minor

catastrophes that happen in your office. Be sincere, and admit that

the efficiency of the average office is naught but a pretty legend. A

mistake or negligence or forgetfulness in an office is remedied and

forgotten. Mrs. Omicron--my dear Mr. Omicron--never hears of it. Not

so with Mrs. Omicron's office, as your aroused imagination will tell

you. Mrs. Omicron's parlourmaid's duster fails to make contact with

one small portion of the hall-table. Mr. Omicron walks in, and his

godlike glance drops instantly on the dusty place, and Mr. Omicron

ejaculates sardonically: "H'm! Four women in the house, and they can't

even keep the hall-table respectable!"

Mr. Omicron forgets a letter at the bottom of his unanswered-letter

basket, and a week later an excited cable arrives from overseas, and

that cable demands another cable. No real harm has been done. Ten

dollars spent on cables have cured the ill. Mrs. Omicron, preoccupied

with a rash on the back of the neck of Miss Omicron before-mentioned,

actually comes back from town without having ordered the mutton. In

the afternoon she realizes her horrid sin and rushes to the telephone.

The butcher reassures her. He swears the desired leg shall arrive. But

do you see that boy dallying at the street corner with his mate? He

carries the leg of mutton, and he carries also, though he knows it not

nor cares, the reputation and happiness of Mrs. Omicron. He is late.

As you yourself remarked, Mr. Omicron, if a leg of mutton is put down

late to roast, one of two things must occur--either it will be

under-cooked or the dinner will be late.

Now, if housekeeping was as simple as office-keeping, Mrs. Omicron

would smile in tranquillity at the _contretemps_, and say to herself:

"Never mind, I shall pay the late-posting fee--that will give me an

extra forty minutes." _You_ say that, Mr. Omicron, about your letters,

when you happen to have taken three hours for lunch and your dictation

of correspondence is thereby postponed. Only there is no late-posting

fee in Mrs. Omicron's world. If Mrs. Omicron flung four cents at you

when you came home, and informed you that dinner would be forty

minutes late and that she was paying the fee, what, Mr. Omicron, would

be your state of mind?

And your imagination, now very alert, will carry you even farther than

this, Mr. Omicron, and disclose to you still more fearful difficulties

which Mrs. Omicron has to face in the management of her office or

manufactory. Her staff is uneducated, less educated even than yours.

And her staff is universally characterized by certain peculiarities of

mentality. For example, her staff will never, never, never, come and

say to her: "Please, ma'am, there is only enough coffee left for two

days." No! Her staff will placidly wait forty-eight hours, and then

come at 7 p.m. and say: "Please, ma'am, there isn't enough coffee----"

And worse! You, Mr. Omicron, can say roundly to a clerk: "Look here,

if this occurs again I shall fling you into the street." You are

aware, and he is aware, that a hundred clerks are waiting to take his

place. On the other hand, a hundred mistresses are waiting to take the

place of Mrs. Omicron with regard to her cook. Mrs. Omicron has to do

as best she can. She has to speak softly and to temper discipline,

because the supply of domestic servants is unequal to the demand. And

there is still worse. The worst of all, the supreme disadvantage under

which Mrs. Omicron suffers, is that most of her errors, lapses,

crimes, directly affect a man in the stomach, and the man is a hungry

man.

Mr. Omicron, your imagination, now feverishly active, will thus

demonstrate to you that your wife's earthly lot is not the velvet

couch that you had unimaginatively assumed it to be, and that, indeed,

you would not change places with her for a hundred thousand a year.

Your attitude towards her human limitations will be modified, and the

general mass of misunderstanding between sex and sex will tend to

diminish.

(And if even yet your attitude is not modified, let your imagination

dwell for a few instants on the extraordinary number of bad and

expensive hotels with which you are acquainted--managed, not by

amateurish women, but by professional men. And on the obstinate

mismanagement of the commissariat of your own club--of which you are

continually complaining to members of the house-committee.)

V

I pass to another aspect of Mr. Omicron's private reflections

consequent upon Mrs. Omicron's dreadful failure of tact in asking him

about the ring after the mutton had proved to be underdone and the

coffee to be inadequate. "She only thinks of spending," reflected Mr.

Omicron, resentfully. A more or less true reflection, no doubt, but

there would have been a different colour to it if Mr. Omicron had

exercised the greatest of his faculties. Suppose you were to unscale

your eyes, Mr. Omicron--that is to say, use your imagination--and try

to see that so far as finance is concerned your wife's chief and

proper occupation in life is to spend. Conceive what you would say if

she announced one morning: "Henry, I am sick of spending. I am going

out into the world to earn." Can you not hear yourself employing a

classic phrase about "the woman's sphere"? In brief, there would occur

an altercation and a shindy.

Your imagination, once set in motion, will show you that your conjugal

existence is divided into two great departments--the getting and the

spending departments. Wordsworth chanted that in getting and spending

we lay waste our powers. We could not lay waste our powers in a more

satisfying manner. The two departments, mutually indispensable,

balance each other. You organized them. You made yourself the head of

one and your wife the head of the other. You might, of course, have

organized them otherwise. It was open to you in the Hottentot style to

decree that your wife should do the earning while you did the

spending. But for some mysterious reason this arrangement did not

appeal to you, and you accordingly go forth daily to the office and

return therefrom with money. The theory of your daily excursion is

firmly based in the inherent nature of things. The theory is the

fundamental cosmic one that money is made in order that money may be

spent--either at once or later. Even the miser conforms to this

theory, for he only saves in obedience to the argument that the need

of spending in the future may be more imperious than is the need of

spending at the moment.

The whole of your own personal activity is a mere preliminary to the

activity of Mrs. Omicron. Without hers, yours would be absurd,

ridiculous, futile, supremely silly. By spending she completes and

justifies your labour; she crowns your life by spending. You married

her so that she might spend. You wanted some one to spend, and it was

understood that she should fill the situation. She was brought up to

spend, and you knew that she was brought up to spend. Spending is her

vocation. And yet you turn round on her and complain, "She only thinks

of spending."

"Yes," you say, "but there is such a thing as moderation." There is; I

admit it. The word "extravagance" is no idle word in the English

language. It describes a quality which exists. Let it be an axiom that

Mrs. Omicron is human. Just as the tendency to get may grow on you,

until you become a rapacious and stingy money-grubber, so the tendency

to spend may grow on her. One has known instances. A check-action must

be occasionally employed. Agreed! But, Mr. Omicron, you should choose

a time and a tone for employing it other than you chose on this

evening that I have described. A man who mixes up jewelled rings with

undertone mutton and feeble coffee is a clumsy man.

Exercise your imagination to put yourself in the place of Mrs.

Omicron, and you will perceive that she is constantly in the highly

delicate difficulty of having to ask for money, or at any rate of

having to suggest or insinuate that money should be given to her. It

is her right and even her duty to ask for money, but the foolish,

illogical creature--like most women, even those with generous and

polite husbands--regards the process as a little humiliating for

herself. You, Mr. Omicron, have perhaps never asked for money. But

your imagination will probably be able to make you feel how it feels

to ask for money. A woman whose business in life it is to spend money

which she does not and cannot earn may sometimes have to face a

refusal when she asks for money. But there is one thing from which she

ought to be absolutely and eternally safe--and that is a snub.