How rarely in our country do you find a woman who is an interesting companion for a man, except as female and male pair or survey the prospect of pairing? And it matters not what line of activity the man is taking--business, politics, literature, art, philanthropy even. The women are eternally talking about their superiority to the business man; but do they get along any better with an artist--unless he is cultivating the woman for the sake of an order for a picture? Is there any line of serious endeavor in which an American woman is interesting and helpful and companionable to a man? I can get along very well with an artist. I have one friend who is a writer of novels, another who is a writer of plays, a third who is a sculptor. They are interested in my work, and I in theirs. We talk together on a basis of equal interest, and we give each other ideas. Can any American woman say the same? I don’t inquire anticipating a negative answer. I simply put the question. But I suspect the answer would put a pin in the bubble of the American woman’s pretense of superior culture. She is fooled by her vanity, I fear, and by her sex attraction, and by the influence of the money her despised father or husband gives her. There’s a reason why America is notoriously the land of bachelor husbands--and that reason is not the one the women and foreign fortune hunters assert. The American man lets the case go by default against him, not because he couldn’t answer, nor yet because he is polite, but _because he is indifferent_. But my wife was talking about her projected assault upon New York. “I really must be an extraordinary woman,” said she. “How I have fought all these years to raise myself, with you dragging at me to keep me down.” “I?” protested her unhappy husband. “Why, dear, I’ve never opposed you in any way. And I’ve tried to do what I could to help you. You must admit the money’s been useful.” “Oh, you’ve never been mean about money,” conceded she. “But you don’t sympathize with a single one of my ideals.” “I want you to have whatever you want,” said I. “And anything I can do to get it for you, or to help you get it, I stand ready to do.” “Yes, I know, Godfrey, dear,” said she, giving me a long hug and a kiss. “No woman ever had a more generous husband than I have.”