After ten months of married life Edna fell ill. All you married men will prick up your ears at that. Why is it that bread winners somehow contrive to keep on their feet most of the time, little though they know as to caring for their health, reckless though they are in eating and drinking? Why is it that married women--unless they have to work--spend so much time in sick bed or near it? They say we in America have more than nine times as many doctors proportionately to population as any other country. The doctors live off of our women--our idle, overeating, lazy women who will not work, who will not walk, who are always getting something the matter with them. Of course the doctors--parasites upon parasites--fake up all kinds of lies, many of them malicious slanders against the husbands, to excuse their patients and to keep them patients. But what is the truth? Edna, who read all the time she was not plotting to get acquainted with our neighbors--they looked down upon us and wished to have nothing to do with us--Edna who ate quantities of candy between meals and ate at meals rich things she bought of confectioners and bakers--Edna fell ill and frightened me almost out of my senses. I understand it now. But I did not understand then. I believed, as do all ignorant people--both the obviously ignorant and the ignorant who pass for enlightened--I believed sickness to be a mysterious accident, like earthquakes and lightning strokes, a hit-or-miss blow from nowhere in particular. So I was all sympathy and terror. She got well. She looked as well as ever. But she said she was not strong. “And Godfrey, we simply have got to keep a girl. I’ve borne up bravely. But I can’t stand it any longer. You see for yourself, the rough work and the strain of housekeeping are too much for me.” “Very well,” said I. The bills, including the doctor’s and drug bills, were piling up. We were more than a thousand dollars in debt. But I said: “Very well. You are right.” We men do not realize that there are two distinct and equal expressions of strength. The strength of bulk, that is often deceptive in that it looks stronger than it is; the strength of fiber, that is always deceptive in that it is stronger than it looks. In a general way, man has the strength of bulk, woman the strength of fiber. So man looks on woman’s appearance of fragility and fancies her weak and himself the stronger. I looked at Edna, and said: “Very well. We must have a girl to help.”