crimes, directly affect a man in the stomach, and the man is a hungry
man.

Mr. Omicron, your imagination, now feverishly active, will thus
demonstrate to you that your wife's earthly lot is not the velvet
couch that you had unimaginatively assumed it to be, and that, indeed,
you would not change places with her for a hundred thousand a year.
Your attitude towards her human limitations will be modified, and the
general mass of misunderstanding between sex and sex will tend to
diminish.

(And if even yet your attitude is not modified, let your imagination
dwell for a few instants on the extraordinary number of bad and
expensive hotels with which you are acquainted--managed, not by
amateurish women, but by professional men. And on the obstinate
mismanagement of the commissariat of your own club--of which you are
continually complaining to members of the house-committee.)



V


I pass to another aspect of Mr. Omicron's private reflections
consequent upon Mrs. Omicron's dreadful failure of tact in asking him
about the ring after the mutton had proved to be underdone and the
coffee to be inadequate. "She only thinks of spending," reflected Mr.
Omicron, resentfully. A more or less true reflection, no doubt, but
there would have been a different colour to it if Mr. Omicron had
exercised the greatest of his faculties. Suppose you were to unscale