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