your eyes, Mr. Omicron--that is to say, use your imagination--and try
to see that so far as finance is concerned your wife's chief and
proper occupation in life is to spend. Conceive what you would say if
she announced one morning: "Henry, I am sick of spending. I am going
out into the world to earn." Can you not hear yourself employing a
classic phrase about "the woman's sphere"? In brief, there would occur
an altercation and a shindy.

Your imagination, once set in motion, will show you that your conjugal
existence is divided into two great departments--the getting and the
spending departments. Wordsworth chanted that in getting and spending
we lay waste our powers. We could not lay waste our powers in a more
satisfying manner. The two departments, mutually indispensable,
balance each other. You organized them. You made yourself the head of
one and your wife the head of the other. You might, of course, have
organized them otherwise. It was open to you in the Hottentot style to
decree that your wife should do the earning while you did the
spending. But for some mysterious reason this arrangement did not
appeal to you, and you accordingly go forth daily to the office and
return therefrom with money. The theory of your daily excursion is
firmly based in the inherent nature of things. The theory is the
fundamental cosmic one that money is made in order that money may be
spent--either at once or later. Even the miser conforms to this
theory, for he only saves in obedience to the argument that the need
of spending in the future may be more imperious than is the need of
spending at the moment.

The whole of your own personal activity is a mere preliminary to the
activity of Mrs. Omicron. Without hers, yours would be absurd,
ridiculous, futile, supremely silly. By spending she completes and