It was necessary that we move to a place more convenient to my business headquarters in New York City. A few weeks after I got the eight thousand a year, Edna, and little Margot and I went to Brooklyn to live--took a really charming house in Bedford Avenue, with large grounds around it. And once more we were happy. It seemed to me we had started afresh. And we had. II Why did we go to Brooklyn? By the time Edna and I had been married six years I learned many things about her inmost self. I was not at all analytic or critical as to matters at home. I used my intelligence in my own business; I assumed that my wife had intelligence and that she used it in her business--her part of our joint business. I believed the reason her part of it went badly was solely the natural conditions of life beyond her control. A railroad, a factory could be run smoothly; a family and a household were different matters. And I admired my wife as much as I loved her, and regarded her as a wonderful woman, which, indeed, in certain respects she was. But I had discovered in her several weaknesses. Some of these I knew; others I did not permit myself to know that I knew. For example, I was perfectly aware that she was not so truthful as one might be. But I did not let myself admit that she was not always unconscious of her own deviations from the truth. I had gained enough experience of life to learn that lying is practically a universal weakness. So I did not especially mind it in her, often found it amusing. I had not then waked up to the fact that, as a rule, women systematically lie to their husbands about big things and little, and that those women who profess to be too proud to lie, do their lying by indirections, such as omissions, half truths, and misleading silences. I am not criticising. Self-respect, real personal pride, I have discovered in spite of the reading matter of all kinds about the past, is a modern development, is still in embryo; and those of us who profess to be the proudest are either the most ignorant of ourselves or the most hypocritical. But back to my acquaintance with my wife’s character. When I told her we should have to live nearer my work, my new work, than Passaic, she promptly said: “Let’s go to Brooklyn.” “Why not to New York?” said I. “At least until I get thoroughly trained, I want to be close to the office.” “But there’s Margot,” said she. “Margot must have a place to play in. And we couldn’t afford such a place in New York. I can’t let her run about the streets or go to public schools. She’d pick up all sorts of low, coarse associates and habits.” “Then let’s go to some town opposite--across the Hudson. If we can’t live on Manhattan Island, and I think you’re right about Margot, why, let’s live where living is cheap. We ought to be saving some money.” “I hate these Jersey towns,” said Edna petulantly. “I don’t think Margot would get the right sort of social influences in them.”