experienced no other life. But as was shown in the first chapter,
industry and feminism have given woman a taste of other kinds of life
and have developed her individual points of character and abilities.
Perhaps she has been the bookkeeper of a large concern; or the private
secretary to a man of exciting affairs; or she has been the buyer for
some house; or she has dabbled in art or literature; or she has been a
factory girl mingling with hundreds of others, working hard, but in a
large group; or a saleslady in a department store,--and domestic life is
expected of her as if she had been trained for it. In fact, she has been
trained away from it.

The novelists delight to tell us of the woman who seeks a career and
enters the struggle of her profession and fails. And then there comes,
just when her failure is greatest and she is most weepingly feminine,
the patient hero, and he holds out his arms, and she slips into them,
oh, so joyously! She now has a home, and will be happy--long row of
asterisks, and have children; and if it is a movie, a year or more
elapses and we are permitted to gaze upon a charming domestic scene.

But alas for reel life as against real life! We are not shown how she
yearns for the activities of her old career; we are not shown the
feeling she constantly has that she is too good for housekeeping. If she
has been fortunate enough to marry a rich and indulgent man, she becomes
a dilettante in her work, playing with art or science. If her first
vocation was business, she is bored to death by domesticity. But if she
marries poverty, she looks on herself as a drudge, and though loyalty
and pride may keep her from voicing her regrets, they eat like a canker
worm in the bud,--and we have the neurosis of this type of housewife. Or
else her experience in business makes her size up her husband more
keenly, and we find her rebelling against his failure, criticizing him