Indeed, he is not so free.  Of the two sexes the woman is in the more powerful position.  For the average woman is at the head of something with which she can do as she likes; the average man has to obey orders and do nothing else.  He has to put one dull brick on another dull brick, and do nothing else; he has to add one dull figure to another dull figure, and do nothing else.  The woman’s world is a small one, perhaps, but she can alter it.  The woman can tell the tradesman with whom she deals some realistic things about himself.  The clerk who does this to the manager generally gets the sack, or shall we say (to avoid the vulgarism), finds himself free for higher culture.  Above all, as I said in my previous article, the woman does work which is in some small degree creative and individual.  She can put the flowers or the furniture in fancy arrangements of her own.  I fear the bricklayer cannot put the bricks in fancy arrangements of his own, without disaster to himself and others.  If the woman is only putting a patch into a carpet, she can choose the thing with regard to colour.  I fear it would not do for the office boy dispatching a parcel to choose his stamps with a view to colour; to prefer the tender mauve of the sixpenny to the crude scarlet of the penny stamp.  A woman cooking may not always cook artistically; still she can cook artistically.  She can introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the composition of a soup.  The clerk is not encouraged to introduce a personal and imperceptible alteration into the figures in a ledger.

The trouble is that the real question I raised is not discussed.  It is argued as a problem in pennies, not as a problem in people.  It is not the proposals of these reformers that I feel to be false so much as their temper and their arguments.  I am not nearly so certain that communal kitchens are wrong as I am that the defenders of communal kitchens are wrong.  Of course, for one thing, there is a vast difference between the communal kitchens of which I spoke and the communal meal (monstrum horrendum, informe) which the darker and wilder mind of my correspondent diabolically calls up.  But in both the trouble is that their defenders will not defend them humanly as human institutions.  They will not interest themselves in the staring psychological fact that there are some things that a man or a woman, as the case may be, wishes to do for himself or herself.  He or she must do it inventively, creatively, artistically, individually—­in a word, badly.  Choosing your wife (say) is one of these things.  Is choosing your husband’s dinner one of these things?  That is the whole question:  it is never asked.