Evenings I go out with my husband, or sit around with my husband, or take leave of him for a few hours at the hall door. My husband would be the sort of man that is called a Good Scout. And he would have married me not for my wistfulness or wickedness or weirdness but for that I am a proper Shape and Size, with a smooth proper covering of flesh, to make a suitable sizable wife. And he would be a heavy grappling anchor to hold me fast in an ocean of domesticness. Men of the genus Good Scout are all fiercely alike. All women, no matter what their genus, are exceptions to the rule. But men--rich men, poor men, beggar-men, thieves: so only they are Good Scouts--are of marvelous sameness. It comes from the want of minute lifelong pinpricking care of petticoats and potted plants--a detailed intensely personal sort of pain which touches dull solid tones of individuality with vivid various spots of color. Men are made in ‘job lots’ like their own cravats. Their cravats will differ in texture and color and quality and price. But each one is innately necktie. Use it as a garter or a tourniquet or a strangler’s noose: it still is a man’s deadly necktie. Its use may be ruined but its necktique is deathless. Except poets--and perhaps scientists--men are themselves like that. They cannot get away from the Adam. Nor can women get away from the Eve. But Eve was not a type but a somewhat pleasant human ensemble. While Adam was a type and a sufficiently nasty one: a rotter and a welcher: doubtless the Good Scout type of his day. A Good Scout is the sort of man who if a woman trusts him with one one-hundredth of her heart will take the whole heart and twist and batter it: and read the paper and smoke his pipe and pay the bills: serenely unaware. Which is beside the point in this. For in this image all my marriedness is a thing of outer Shape and Size and Suitableness. The odd but natural sequence is that I make an excellent wife. Excellent is the word. I keep a neat house with no dust left in the corners and no dead leaves on the potted plants. My husband is well looked after as to breakfasts and dinners and bodily comfort, and I am rigidly square with him and chastely true to him. If, some dinnertime, as I sit opposite him in a soft pretty chiffon gown, my secret thoughts overflow their troughs and I passionately forget the potted plants and the window-sills and want horribly to rise up and bloodily murder my husband for being such a Good Scout: that would be a genuinely powerless matter, a cobweb trifle, compared with my actual potent Shape and Size which are so suitable for a wife. I make truly and simply an excellent wife. --by God and my Soul-and-bones! it would be honester, finer, sweeter--more _comfortable_ to be the dirty beggar-woman in the wet slippery streets-- But it’s facilely fancied because I am of Right Dimensions to be some Good Scout’s wife.