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.)
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