Slipshod people never test such old assumptions against
actuality; they cling to what their grandfathers said, and call
their slipshodness conservatism. So (like ostriches) they avoid
the fact that there are three large and growing classes of
women who simply have no relation to their comfortable old
theory. I refer, of course, to the classes of Temporary
Spinsters, of Permanent Spinsters, and of Married but
Idle--childless wives living in boarding-houses, for example.
Let no Old Tory conceive that he has disposed of the Woman
Question until he can plainly answer: What are all these
various women to DO in their fifteen waking hours a day?
Following which, he lit a cigarette in a moody manner, and sat frowning
at the back of the head of his relative and secretary, who was clacking
away all the while on a second-hand typewriter near by.
It will be contended that some hesitancy was fitting enough to the
writer's thesis, Woman having raised perplexities in the bosoms of
philosophers from the earliest times on. But perplexity did not happen
to be the trouble with this philosopher, Charles King Garrott. These
sentences Mr. Garrott so apathetically set down were the ancient
commonplaces of his mind, the familiar bare bones of special researches
long holding a unique position in his life. The dull General Public,
with its economic eye, might yet rate him merely as a private tutor,
formerly of Blaines College; the relative and secretary there might
judge him only a young man of an unmasculine thin sedentary quality, who
mysteriously gave his youth to producing piles of strange stuff that all
had to be copied out on the typewriter. But, in the privacy of his own
soul, Charles Garrott was, through all, not alone the coming American
novelist (which rather went without saying), but, in that direct
connection, probably the only man in the world who really understood
Woman.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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