Howard Madison Grey, the playwright, was then composing his fourth play, "Cleopatra's Needle." His practise was to dictate rapidly to Janet for an hour and a half, after which she was expected to typewrite the sketchy dialogue, changes in grammar and syntax and even in diction being left, as time went on, more and more to her discretion. As the work appealed to her interest as well as to her skill, she despatched it with zest.
Bit by bit, two drawbacks emerged, however. One was Janet's liability to mistakes because of an absorption in the plot, an absorption so deep as to interfere seriously with quick mechanical transcription. The other was Mrs. Howard Madison Grey.
This lady had opened a correspondence with her future husband during the short run of his first play, "The Spice of Life," for the hero of which (a masterful but incorrigible polygamist) she had conceived an unbounded admiration. The correspondence ripened into matrimony, Mrs. Grey bringing her spouse the money and influence that lifted him swiftly to a solid place in the theatrical world.
When his second play, "The Love that Lies," financed by her father, scored a big hit, she noticed that he became the gratified recipient of a good deal of feminine attention. Mindful of the polygamous experiments of his two masterful heroes, she remembered that precaution is the better part of safety. Marriage had considerably modified her point of view, and she now had a conviction that there should be a yawning gulf between the pluralistic imaginings of the dramatist and the monogamic behavior of the husband.
To give this conviction shape, she enframed him in a watchful chaperonage. Chaperonage was not the name she used. She called it, "being a helpmeet."
The helpmeet's first official act was to place Mr. Grey's communications with the world beyond-the-home under a strict censorship. She looked after his correspondence, registered his engagements, and kept in telephonic touch with him when he went to a club or directed a rehearsal. Let the enemy idolaters capture him (if they could) through the barbed-wire entanglements of her devotion!
In the same spirit, she threw cold water on his business-like proposal to do his writing in an office building. Such an environment, she said, would kill the soul of his art. Her substitute was a study, comfortably fitted up in his own home; and there, accordingly, he and Janet were obliged to work.
Mrs. Howard Madison Grey was a woman of fixed opinions. She was firm in the belief that a transcendent artistic talent was lodged in her husband; she was equally firm in the belief that a transcendent executive talent was lodged in herself. On the principle that it pays to specialize she held it to be no more than right that any power or glory acquired by the name of Howard Madison Grey should be exercised by the executive branch of the family. About this opinion she was entirely frank.
"I've made him," she said to Janet, one day. "Why should I let others enjoy the fruit of my labors?"
This was said as much in warning as in confidence. Janet was greatly amused, inasmuch as her feelings toward her employer were unsentimental to the point of prosiness.