He chuckled and began to cut the grass furiously, reminding me of a thoroughbred hunter I once saw harnessed to a plow.

“P’fessors of pugilism and dancing,” he went on gravely, “haven’t a bit more dignity than we have.  They merely have more money.  Just think!  There isn’t a butcher or grocer in this town who doesn’t doff his hat to me when he whizzes by in his motor—­even those whose bills I haven’t paid.  It’s great to have dignity.  I don’t believe there’s another place in the world where he who rides makes obeisance to him who walks.  Much better than getting as high wages as a trustee’s chauffeur!  A salary is so much more dignified than wages.”

He stopped to mop his brow, looking perfectly dignified.

“And yet,” he added, egged on by my laughter, for I always loved his quiet irony—­it was never directed at individuals, but at the ideas and traditions they blandly and blindly followed—­

“And yet carping critics of the greatest nation on earth try to make out that art and intellectuality are not properly recognized in the States.  Pessimists!  Look at our picture galleries, filled with old masters from abroad!  Think how that helps American artists!  Look at our colleges, crowded with buildings more costly than Oxford’s!  Think how that encourages American teachers!  Simply because an occasional foreign professor gets higher pay—­bah!  There are better things than money.  For example, this!”

And he bent to his mower again, with much the same derisively dignified strut as on that memorable day long ago when I came and saw and was conquered by it—­only then he wore black silk sleeves and now white shirtsleeves.

And so much for dignity.

I soon saw that if I were to be a help and not a hindrance to the man I loved I should have to depart from what I had been carefully trained to regard as woman’s only true sphere.  Do not be alarmed!  I had no thought of leaving home or husband.  It is simply that the home, in the industrial sense, is leaving the house—­seventy-five per cent of it social scientists say, has gone already—­so that nowadays a wife must go out after it or else find some new-fashioned productive substitute if she really intends to be an old-fashioned helpmate to her husband.

It was not a feminist theory but a financial condition that confronted us.  My done-over trousseau would not last forever, nor would Carl’s present intellectual wardrobe, which was becoming threadbare.  Travel abroad and foreign study are just as necessary for an American scholar as foreign buying is for an American dealer in trousseaus.

I thought of many plans; but in a college town a woman’s opportunities are so limited.  We are not paid enough to be ladies, though we are required to dress and act like them—­do not forget that point.  And yet, when willing to stop being a lady, what could one do?