“Good morning, Mr. Toomey.” (Very gracious; the lady speaking to the trades person.) “Good morning, ma’am.” (Fat little butcher touching cracked and broken-nailed hand to hat respectfully.) “That lamb you sent yesterday was very tough.” “Sorry, ma’am. But those kind of things will happen, you know.” (Most flatteringly humble of manner.) “Yes, I know. Do your best. I’m sure you try to please. Send me--let me see--say, two chickens for broiling. You’ll pick out nice ones?” “Yes, indeed, ma’am. I’ll attend to it myself.” “And something for the servants. You know what they like.” “Yes, ma’am. I’ll attend to it.” “And you’ll not overcharge, will you?” “I, ma’am? I’ve been dealing with ladies for twenty years, right here, ma’am. I never have overcharged.” “I know. All the ladies tell me you’re honest. I feel safe with you. Let me see, there were some other things. But I’m in a hurry. The cook will tell your boy when he takes what I’ve ordered. You’ll be sure to give me the best?” “I’d not dare send anything else to _you_, ma’am.” (Groveling.) A gracious smile, a gracious nod, and Edna rejoined me. Innocent as I was, and under the spell that blinds the American man where the American woman is concerned, I could not but be upset by this example of how our house was run--an example that all in an instant brought to my mind and enabled me to understand a score, a hundred similar examples. There was I, toiling away to make money, earning every dollar by the hardest kind of mental labor, struggling to rise, to make our fortune, and each day my wife was tossing carelessly out of the windows into the street a large part of my earnings. I did not know what to do about it. Edna’s next stop was at the grocer’s. I had not the courage to halt and listen. I knew it would be a repetition of the grotesque interview with the butcher. And she undoubtedly a clever woman--alert, improving. What a mystery! I went on to my office. That day, without giving my acquaintances there an inkling of what was in my mind, I made inquiries into how their wives spent the money that went for food--the most important item in the spending of incomes under ten or twelve thousand a year. In every case the wife or the mother did the marketing by telephone. All the men except one took the ignorance and incompetence of the management of the household expenses as a matter of course. One man grumbled a little. I remember he said: “No wonder it’s hard for the men to save anything. The women waste most of it on the table, paying double prices for poor stuff. I tell you, Loring, the American woman is responsible for the dishonesty of American commercial life. They are always nagging at the man for more and more money to spend, and in spending it they tempt the merchants, the clerks, their own servants, everyone within range, to become swindlers and thieves.”