And your imagination, now very alert, will carry you even farther than
this, Mr. Omicron, and disclose to you still more fearful difficulties
which Mrs. Omicron has to face in the management of her office or
manufactory. Her staff is uneducated, less educated even than yours.
And her staff is universally characterized by certain peculiarities of
mentality. For example, her staff will never, never, never, come and
say to her: "Please, ma'am, there is only enough coffee left for two
days." No! Her staff will placidly wait forty-eight hours, and then
come at 7 p.m. and say: "Please, ma'am, there isn't enough coffee----"
And worse! You, Mr. Omicron, can say roundly to a clerk: "Look here,
if this occurs again I shall fling you into the street." You are
aware, and he is aware, that a hundred clerks are waiting to take his
place. On the other hand, a hundred mistresses are waiting to take the
place of Mrs. Omicron with regard to her cook. Mrs. Omicron has to do
as best she can. She has to speak softly and to temper discipline,
because the supply of domestic servants is unequal to the demand. And
there is still worse. The worst of all, the supreme disadvantage under
which Mrs. Omicron suffers, is that most of her errors, lapses,
crimes, directly affect a man in the stomach, and the man is a hungry
man.
Mr. Omicron, your imagination, now feverishly active, will thus
demonstrate to you that your wife's earthly lot is not the velvet
couch that you had unimaginatively assumed it to be, and that, indeed,
you would not change places with her for a hundred thousand a year.
Your attitude towards her human limitations will be modified, and the
general mass of misunderstanding between sex and sex will tend to
diminish.
(And if even yet your attitude is not modified, let your imagination
dwell for a few instants on the extraordinary number of bad and
expensive hotels with which you are acquainted--managed, not by
amateurish women, but by professional men. And on the obstinate
mismanagement of the commissariat of your own club--of which you are
continually complaining to members of the house-committee.)
V
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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