Listen, Mr. Johnson. What you want us to do is to live just the sort of life that you and your wife live--no children to take care of, no washing nor cooking nor nothing. Well, what I say is, excuse me! That may be all right for you and your wife--she don’t need no housework nor children nor nothing to keep her busy. Her time is full of all sorts of useful things--I know that. (MAXWELL _stirs uneasily and looks at the floor_.) But with Annie, my wife, it’s a different proposition altogether. She’s one of them women--and there’s a lot more of them than you think--that can’t stand living in a nice regular apartment with nothing to do. I know because we tried it when we was first married. It’s like what the old fellow said: “Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do”! MAXWELL True enough! And-- RYAN Listen, Mr. Johnson. When we was first married, Annie was one of these here idle hands they tell of. She was an idle hand for three years, and Satan, as the old fellow said, certainly found some mischief for her to do. Not anything real bad--there’s no real harm in Annie--but it was mischief all right. For the first three years we was living in a nice apartment in Brooklyn. I wasn’t a janitor, then; I was driving a truck. I was out all day and I got home every night at six or seven o’clock. All Annie has to do is to get my breakfast and supper and keep the place clean. Does she do it? Sure she does, for the first four or five weeks! Then she gets to making friends with other women in the building and going out to matinees and vaudeville and all that sort of thing. That’s all right--I can afford it--I don’t care if she has a good time; but then what does she do? I give her two dollars in the morning to go out and buy a good supper for me when I come home. I come home and she ain’t in yet, and the lady in the next flat gives me the groceries that she’s sent home. And what is they? A little chipped beef and a box of Saratoga chips and some baker’s bread. About fifty-cent’s worth. When she gets home I ask her where she’s been. Why, Mrs. Eindorfer has took her to a spiritualist meeting, and she’s spent the rest of that money to look into a glass ball or have her fortune told or some such foolishness. Now this goes on for nearly three years. It ain’t all spiritualists’ meetings; it’s all sorts of things. She makes all sorts of friends, women and men, too; I had to beat a couple of ’em up. The flat wasn’t kept up; I run into debt; my meals wasn’t cooked right or on time, and Annie was half sick all the time just from running around entertaining herself. I ain’t blaming her. She wasn’t to blame. And what was to blame? The apartment house was to blame. When Peter was born, after we’d been married three years, and I gave up trucking and moved out of that apartment house and got a job as janitor, everything was all right. And everything’s been all right ever since.