“No,” he said. “I can’t have people paid to wait on my personal wants.”
“People wait on you in hotels,” said Andrée.
“Professionally,” he said. “They serve the public, not me.”
“But if we don’t have servants, how can we be free to do our work?”
“That’s one of the reasons these private homes are so bad,” he said. “It means nothing but an autocratic—”
“I know,” said Andrée, hastily. “Well, then, we can go out to dinner every night, and we’ll have a visiting maid and a Jap for a few hours every day. They can still be serving some more of the public when they’re not with us.”
“That’s nothing but compromise. But it’s better than having anyone’s life entirely given up to our personal service. I suppose it’s a necessary part of—all this,” he said, looking about his domain. He was inwardly miserable and humiliated; Andrée knew it, but she felt that he would soon enough get used to it. She wanted beauty and luxury about her, and she considered that several grosser souls might well be occupied in ministering to her.
“Servants aren’t unhappy, Al,” she said, “if they’re well treated.”
“No, I dare say they’re not. Neither are kept women. Or imbeciles,” he replied. He suppressed the rest of his thoughts, in deference to Andrée’s instincts, both feminine and artistic. As a woman she was apparently obliged to have a home, and as an artist, it had to be this sort of home. He was conscious himself of a very unreasonable instinct to give her everything she wanted; he consoled himself by the reflection that this desire to please women was what stimulated men to supreme effort—a condition which gave more credit to his sex than to hers, he thought. He had by this time almost entirely discarded his idea that men and women were not very different, were all simply human beings. He considered it generously; which, he asked himself, was the true normal human being, Man or Woman? Not both of them....
“Perhaps what we call feminine traits are the really human ones,” he thought. “Woman’s compassion, her intuition, her flexibility.... Our masculine justice and logic may be aberrations from the normal.... Women are primarily concerned with reality—birth, love, death—”