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.