The man discovered that potato pies took a bit more making than he had reckoned--found that running the house and looking after the children was not quite the merry pastime he had argued.Man was a fool.
Now it is the woman who talks without thinking.How did she like hoeing the potato patch? Hard work, was it not, my dear lady? Made your back ache? It came on to rain and you got wet.
I don't see that it very much matters which of you hoes the potato patch, which of you makes the potato pie.Maybe the hoeing of the patch demands more muscle--is more suited to the man.Maybe the making of the pie may be more in your department.But, as I have said, I cannot see that this matter is of importance.The patch has to be hoed, the pie to be cooked; the one cannot do the both.Settle it between you, and, having settled it, agree to do each your own work free from this everlasting nagging.
I know, personally, three ladies who have exchanged the woman's work for the man's.One was deserted by her husband, and left with two young children.She hired a capable woman to look after the house, and joined a ladies' orchestra as pianist at two pounds a week.She now earns four, and works twelve hours a day.The husband of the second fell ill.She set him to write letters and run errands, which was light work that he could do, and started a dressmaker's business.
The third was left a widow without means.She sent her three children to boarding-school, and opened a tea-room.I don't know how they talked before, but I know that they do not talk now as though earning the income was a sort of round game.
[When they have tried it the other way round.]
On the Continent they have gone deliberately to work, one would imagine, to reverse matters.Abroad woman is always where man ought to be, and man where most ladies would prefer to meet with women.
The ladies garde-robe is superintended by a superannuated sergeant of artillery.When I want to curl my moustache, say, I have to make application to a superb golden-haired creature, who stands by and watches me with an interested smile.I would be much happier waited on by the superannuated sergeant, and my wife tells me she could very well spare him.But it is the law of the land.I remember the first time I travelled with my daughter on the Continent.In the morning Iwas awakened by a piercing scream from her room.I struggled into my pyjamas, and rushed to her assistance.I could not see her.I could see nothing but a muscular-looking man in a blue blouse with a can of hot water in one hand and a pair of boots in the other.He appeared to be equally bewildered with myself at the sight of the empty bed.
From a cupboard in the corner came a wail of distress:
"Oh, do send that horrid man away.What's he doing in my room?"I explained to her afterwards that the chambermaid abroad is always an active and willing young man.The foreign girl fills in her time bricklaying and grooming down the horses.It is a young and charming lady who serves you when you enter the tobacconist's.She doesn't understand tobacco, is unsympathetic; with Mr.Frederic Harrison, regards smoking as a degrading and unclean habit; cannot see, herself, any difference between shag and Mayblossom, seeing that they are both the same price; thinks you fussy.The corset shop is run by a most presentable young man in a Vandyck beard.The wife runs the restaurant; the man does the cooking, and yet the woman has not reached freedom from bother.
[A brutal suggestion]
It sounds brutal, but perhaps woman was not intended to live free from all bothers.Perhaps even the higher life--the skirt-dancing and the poker work--has its bothers.Perhaps woman was intended to take her share of the world's work--of the world's bothers.
