’Hello!  Hello!  Yes.  Who’s there?  Oh, all right.  Go ahead.  Yes, it’s me!  Hey, what?  Repeat.  Sold for how much?  Forty-four and a half?  Repeat.  No!  I told you to hold on.  What?  What? Who bought at that?  Say, hold a minute.  Cable the other side.  No.  Hold on.  I’ll come down. (Business with watch.) Tell Schaefer I’ll see him to-morrow.’ (Over his shoulder to his wife, who wears half-hoop diamond rings at 10 A.M.) ’Lizzie, where’s my grip?  I’ve got to go down.’

And he goes down to eat in a hotel and sleep in his shut-up house.  Men are as scarce at most of the summer places as they are in Indian hill-stations in late April.  The women tell you that they can’t get away, and if they did they would only be miserable to get back.  Now whether this wholesale abandonment of husbands by wives is wholesome let those who know the beauties of the Anglo-Indian system settle for themselves.

That both men and women need rest very badly a glance at the crowded hotel tables makes plain—­so plain, indeed, that the foreigner who has not been taught that fuss and worry are in themselves honourable wishes sometimes he could put the whole unrestful crowd to sleep for seventeen hours a day.  I have inquired of not less than five hundred men and women in various parts of the States why they broke down and looked so gash.  And the men said:  ’If you don’t keep up with the procession in America you are left’; and the women smiled an evil smile and answered that no outsider yet had discovered the real cause of their worry and strain, or why their lives were arranged to work with the largest amount of friction in the shortest given time.  Now, the men can be left to their own folly, but the cause of the women’s trouble has been revealed to me.  It is the thing called ‘Help’ which is no help.  In the multitude of presents that the American man has given to the American woman (for details see daily papers) he has forgotten or is unable to give her good servants, and that sordid trouble runs equally through the household of the millionaire or the flat of the small city man.  ’Yes, it’s easy enough to laugh,’ said one woman passionately, ’we are worn out, and our children are worn out too, and we’re always worrying, I know it.  What can we do?  If you stay here you’ll know that this is the land of all the luxuries and none of the necessities.  You’ll know and then you won’t laugh.  You’ll know why women are said to take their husbands to boarding-houses and never have homes.  You’ll know what an Irish Catholic means.  The men won’t get up and attend to these things, but we would.  If we had female suffrage, we’d shut the door to all the Irish and throw it open to all the Chinese, and let the women have a little protection.’  It was the cry of a soul worn thin with exasperation, but it was truth.  To-day I do not laugh any more at the race that depends on inefficient helot races for its inefficient service.