The Judge doesn’t have any such feeling about pickles or any other household affairs. When he goes home at night, he reads or smokes or plays billiards. When the lady who is his law partner goes home, even though their New York residence is at an apartment hotel, she finds many duties to engage her attention. The magazines on the table would get to be as ancient as those in a dentist’s office if she didn’t remove the back numbers. Who else would conduct the correspondence that makes and breaks dinner engagements and do it so gracefully as to maintain the family’s perfect social balance? Who else would indite with an appropriate sentiment and tie up and address all the Christmas packages that have to be sent annually to a large circle of relatives? Well, all these and innumerable other things you may be sure the Judge wouldn’t do. He simply can’t be annoyed with petty and trivial matters. He says that for the successful practice of his profession, he requires outside of his office hours rest and relaxation. Now the other partner practises without them. And you can see which is likely to make the greater legal reputation.
In upper Manhattan, at a Central Park West address, a woman physician’s sign occupies the front window of a brown stone front residence. She happens to be a friend of mine. Katherine is one of the most successful women practitioners in New York. Nine patients waited for her in the ante room the last time I was there. From the basement door, inadvertently left ajar, there floated up the sound of the doctor’s voice: “That chicken,” she was saying, “you may cream for luncheon. I have a case at the hospital at two o’clock. We’ll hang the new curtains in the dining-room at three. And—well, I’ll be down again before I start out this morning.”
I know the Doctor so well that I can tell you pretty accurately what were the other domestic duties that had already received her attention. She has a most wonderful kitchen. She had glanced through it to see that the sink was clean and that each shining pot and pan was hanging on its own hook. She had given the order for the day to the butcher. She had planned the dinner for the evening, probably with a soup to utilise the remnants of Sunday’s roast. Then—I have known it to happen—some one perhaps called, “O, say, dear, here’s a button coming loose. Could you, ’er, just spare the time?”
Well, ultimately she stands in the doorway of her office with her calm, pleasant “This way, please” to the first patient, and turns her attention to the diagnosis, we will say, of an appendicitis case. Meanwhile, down the front staircase a carefree gentleman has passed on his way to the doorway of the other office. He is the doctor whose sign is in the other front window of this same brown stone residence. What has he been doing in the early morning hours before taking up his professional duties for the day? His sole employment has been the reading of the morning newspaper! Katherine never interrupts him in that. It is one of the ways she has been such a successful wife. She learned the first year of their marriage how important he considered concentration.
MAN’S EASY WAY TO FAME
Now you can see that there’s a difference in being these two doctors. And it’s a good deal easier being the doctor who doesn’t have to sew on his own buttons and who needs take less thought than the birds of the air about his breakfasts and his luncheons and his dinners, how they shall be ordered for the day. That’s the way every man I know in business or the professions has the bothersome details of living all arranged for him by some one else. I noted recently a business man who was thus speeded on his way to his office from the moment of his call to breakfast. The breakfast table was perfectly appointed. “Is your coffee all right, dear?” his wife inquired solicitously. It was. As it always is. The eggs placed before him had been boiled just one and a half minutes by the clock. He has to have them that way, and by painstaking insistence she has accomplished it with the cook. The muffins were a perfect golden brown. He adores perfection and in every detail she studies to attain it for him. The breakfast that he had finished was a culinary achievement. “Don’t forget your sanatogen, dear,” she cautioned as he folded his napkin. “Honey, you fix it so much better than I can,” he suggested in the persuasive tone of voice that is his particular charm. She hastily set down her coffee cup and rose from the table to do it. Then she selected a white carnation from the centrepiece vase and pinned it in his buttonhole. He likes flowers. She picked up his gloves from the hall table, and discovering a tiny rip, ran lightly upstairs to exchange them for another pair, while he passed round the breakfast table, hat in hand, kissing the five children in turn. Then he kissed her too and went swinging down the front walk to catch the last commuters’ train.
I happened to see him go that morning. But it’s always like that. And when she welcomes him home at night, smiling on the threshold there, the five children are all washed and dressed and in good order, with their latest quarrel hushed to cherubic stillness. The newest magazine is on the library table beneath the softly shaded reading lamp, and a carefully appointed dinner waits. All of the wearisome domestic details of existence he has to be shielded from. For he is a captain of industry.
There are even more difficult men. I know of one who writes. He has to be so protected from the rude environment of this material world that while the muse moves him, his meals carefully prepared by his wife’s own hands, because she knows so well what suits his sensitive digestion, are brought to his door. She may not speak to him as she passes in the tray. No servant is ever permitted to do the cleaning in his sanctum. It disturbs the “atmosphere,” he says. So his wife herself even washes the floor. Hush! His last novel went into the sixth edition. He’s a genius. And his wife says, “You have to take every care of a man who possesses temperament. He’s so easily upset.” For the lack of a salad just right, a book might have failed.
’Er, do you know of any genius of the feminine gender for whom the gods arrange such happy auspices as that? Is there any one trying to be a prominent business or professional woman for whom the wrinkles are all smoothed out of the way of life as for the prominent professional man whom I have mentioned?
We who sat around a dinner table not long ago knew of no such fortunate women among our acquaintance. That dinner, for instance, hadn’t appointed itself. Our hostess, a magazine editor, had hurried in breathless haste from her office at fifteen minutes of six to take up all of the details that demand the “touch of a woman’s hand.” The penetrating odour of a roast about to burn had greeted her as she turned her key in the hall door. She rushed to the oven and rescued that. Two of the napkins on the table didn’t match the set. Marie, the maid, apologetically thought they would “do.” They didn’t. It was the magazine editor who reached into the basket of clean laundry for the right ones and ironed them herself because Marie had to be busy by this time with the soup. The flowers hadn’t come. She telephoned the florist. He was so sorry. But she had ordered marguerites, and there weren’t any that day. Yes, if roses would answer instead, certainly he would send them at once. The bon bons in yellow she found set out on the sideboard in a blue dish. Why weren’t they in the dish of delicate Venetian glass of which she was particularly fond? Well, because the dish of delicate Venetian glass had gone the way of so many delicate dishes, down the dumb waiter shaft an hour ago. Marie didn’t mean to break it, as she assured her mistress by dissolving in tears for some five minutes while more important matters waited. A particular sauce for the dessert depending on the delicacy of its flavouring, the editor must make herself. Well—after everything was all right, it was a composed and unperturbed and smiling hostess who extended the welcome to her invited company.