other man's house, or perhaps his own, while he and the wife he keeps for
his pleasures are visiting concert or entertainment, some weary woman paces
till far into the night bearing with aching back and tired head the
fretful, teething child he brought into the world, for a pittance of twenty
or thirty pounds a year, does not distress him. But that the same woman by
work in an office should earn one hundred and fifty pounds, be able to have
a comfortable home of her own, and her evening free for study or pleasure,
distresses him deeply. It is not the labour, or the amount of labour, so
much as the amount of reward that interferes with his ideal of the eternal
womanly; he is as a rule quite contented that the women of the race should
labour for him, whether as tea-pickers or washerwomen, or toilers for the
children he brings into the world, provided the reward they receive is not
large, nor in such fields as he might himself at any time desire to enter.

When master and ass, drawing a heavy burden between them, have climbed a
steep mountain range together; clambering over sharp rocks and across
sliding gravel where no water is, and herbage is scant; if, when they were
come out on the top of the mountain, and before them stretch broad, green
lands, and through wide half-open gates they catch the glimpse of trees
waving, and there comes the sound of running waters, if then, the master
should say to his ass, "Good beast of mine, lie down! I can push the whole
burden myself now: lie down here; lie down, my creature; you have toiled
enough; I will go on alone!" then it might be even the beast would whisper
(with that glimpse through the swinging gates of the green fields beyond)--
"Good master, we two have climbed this mighty mountain together, and the
stones have cut my hoofs as they cut your feet. Perhaps, if when we were
at the foot you had found out that the burden was two heavy for me, and had
then said to me, 'Lie down, my beastie; I will carry on the burden alone;
lie down and rest!' I might then have listened. But now, just here, where
I see the gates swinging open, a smooth road, and green fields before us, I