"Well, I'm a near relative of my great-aunt's. One day, when all the rest of the family was away, she set fire to the house and burned it to the ground, with everything in it." "She didn't!" broke in Mrs. Sandworth, who had been coaxed to a fitful attention by the promise of a coherent story. Rankin laughed. "Well, that was the way she told it to me, and I don't doubt she _would_ have," he amended. The doctor grunted, "Huh! But would _you_!" He went on, "You couldn't compete with your rivals, anyhow, if you didn't concentrate everything on making chairs. Don't you know the successful business man's best advertisement? 'All of my life-strength I've put into the product I offer you,' he says to the public, and it's true." "Oh, well, if I couldn't do business there'd be an end of the matter, and none of your horrible prophecies would come true." "Your wife wouldn't let you."--Dr. Melton took up another line of attack--"she'd want a motor-car and 'nice' associates and a fashionable school for the children, and a home in the 'respectable' part of town." Rankin's easy-going manner changed. He sat up and frowned. "There you step on one of my corns, Doctor"--he did not apologize for the rustic metaphor--"I don't believe a single, solitary identical word of that. It's my most hotly held conviction that women are so much like humans that you can't tell the difference with a microscope. I mean, if they're interested in petty, personal things it's because they're not given a fair chance at big, impersonal things. Everybody's jumping on the American woman because she knows more about bridge-whist than about her husband's business. _Why_ does she? Because he's satisfied to have her--you can take my word for it! He likes her to be absorbed in clubs and bridge and idiotic little dabblings in near-culture and pseudo-art, just for the reason that a busy mother gives her baby a sticky feather to play with. It keeps the baby busy. It keeps his wife's attention off him. It's the American man just as much as the woman who's mortally afraid of a sure-enough marriage with sure-enough shared interests. He doesn't want to bother with children, or with the servant problem or the questions of family life, and he doesn't want his wife bothering him in his business any more than she wants him interfering with hers. That idea of the matter is common to them both." "That's a fine, chivalric view of the situation," said the doctor sardonically. "Maybe if you'd practiced as long in as many American families as I have, you might have a less idealistic view of your female compatriots." "I don't idealize 'em," cried Rankin. "Good Lord! Don't I say they're just like men? They amount to something if they're given something worth while to do--not otherwise." "Don't you call bringing up children worth while?"