“You men are intolerable. After attending to your own affairs all day, and being free from the fuss of housekeeping, you expect to come home and shuffle into your slippers, and snooze over the evening paper--if it were possible to snooze over the exciting and respectable evening journal you take--while we are to sew, and talk with you if you are talkative, and darn the stockings, and make tea. You come home tired, and likely enough, surly, and gloom about like a thundercloud if dinner isn’t ready for you the instant you are ready for it, and then sit mum and eat it; and snap at the children, and show yourselves the selfish, ugly things you are. Am _I_ to have no fun, never go to the opera, never go to a ball, never have a party at home? Men are tyrants, Mr. Potiphar. They are ogres who entice us poor girls into their castles, and then eat up our happiness and scold us while they eat.” Well, I suppose it is so. I suppose I am an ogre and enticed Polly into my castle. But she didn’t find it large enough, and teased me to build another. I suppose she does sit with me in the evening, and sew, and make tea, and wait upon me. I suppose she does, but I’ve not a clear idea of it. I know it’s unkind of me, when I have been hard at work all day, trying to make and secure the money that gives her and her family everything they want, and which wearies me body and soul, to expect her to let me stay at home, and be quiet. I know I ought to dress and go into Gnu’s house, and smirk at his wife, and stand up in a black suit before him attired in the same way, and talk about the same stocks that we discussed down town in the morning in colored trowsers. That’s a social duty, I suppose. And I ought to see various slight young gentlemen whirl my wife around the room, and hear them tell her when they stop, that it’s very warm. That’s another social duty, I suppose. And I must smile when the same young gentlemen put their elbows into my stomach, and hop on my feet in order to extend the circle of the dance. I’m sure Mrs. P. is right. She does very right to ask, “Have we no social duties, I should like to know?” And when we have performed these social duties in Gnu’s house, how mean it is, how “it looks,” not to build a larger house for him and Mrs. Gnu to come and perform their social duties in. I give it up. There’s no doubt of it. One day Polly said to me: “Mr. Potiphar, we’re getting down town.” “What do you mean, my dear?” “Why, everybody is building above us, and there are actually shops in the next street. Singe, the pastry-cook, has hired Mrs. Croesus’s old house.”