I say also that to spend money efficiently is quite as difficult as to earn it efficiently. Any fool can, somehow, earn a sovereign, but to get value for a sovereign in small purchases means skill and immense knowledge. Mr. Smith has never had experience of the difficulty of spending money efficiently. Most of Mr. Smith’s payments are fixed and mechanical. Mrs. Smith is the spender. Mr. Smith chiefly exercises his skill as a spender in his clothes and in tobacco. Look at the result. Any showy necktie shop and furiously-advertised tobacco is capable of hood-winking Mr. Smith.
In further comparison of their respective “jobs” it has to be noted that Mrs. Smith’s is rendered doubly difficult by the fact that she is always at close quarters with the caprices of human nature. Mrs. Smith is continually bumping up against human nature in various manifestations. The human butcher-boy may arrive late owing to marbles, and so the dinner must either be late or the meat undercooked; or Mr. Smith, through too much smoking, may have lost his appetite, and veal out of Paradise wouldn’t please him! Mrs. Smith’s job is transcendently delicate.
In fine, though Mrs. Smith’s job is perhaps not quite so difficult as she fancies it to be, it is much more difficult than Mr. Smith fancies it to be. And if it is not as well done as she thinks, it is much better done than Mr. Smith thinks. But she will never persuade Mr. Smith that he is wrong until Mr. Smith condescends to know what he is talking about in the discussion of household matters. Mr. Smith’s opportunities of criticism are far too ample; or, at any rate, he makes use of them unfairly, and not as a man of honour. Supposing that Mrs. Smith finished all her work at four o’clock, and was free to stroll into Mr. Smith’s place of business and criticise there everything that did not please her! (It is true that she wouldn’t know what she was talking about; but neither does Mr. Smith at home; at home Mr. Smith finds pride in not knowing what he is talking about.) Mr. Smith would have a bit of a “time” between four and six.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith are united by a genuine affection. But their secret attitudes on the subject of home management cause that affection, by a constant slight friction, to wear thin. It must be so. And it will be so until (a) Mr. Smith deigns to learn the business of his home; (b) Mr. Smith ceases to expect Mrs. Smith to perform miracles; (c) Mrs. Smith ceases to be an amateur in domestic economy—i. e., until domestic economy becomes the principal subject in the upper forms of the average girls’ school.
At present the organisation of the home is an agency against the triumph of marriage as an institution.
V—HAMIT’S POINT OF VIEW
You may have forgotten young Harry Smith, whom I casually mentioned in my first section, the schoolboy of fifteen. I should not be surprised to hear that you had forgotten him. He is often forgotten in the home of the Smiths., Compared with Mr. Smith, the creator of the home, or with the lordly eldest son John, who earns his own living and is nearly engaged, or with Mary, who actually is engaged, young Harry is unimportant. Still, his case is very interesting, and his own personal impression of the home of the Smiths must be of value. .