to find that half the women in the London suburbs do not know the
precise nature of their husbands' occupations. A French woman of the
bourgeois class often has a real aptitude for business. She can manage
a shop, keep accounts, take an interest in markets, and in all
questions of commercial enterprise she is the confidante, and often the
adviser, of her husband. Your English woman of the same class prides
herself rather on her total ignorance of business. It is probable that
in twenty years of married life she has not once visited the warehouse
or the office where her husband earns the income which she spends. She
is 'provided for without the sweet sense of providing.' She sees her
husband elated or depressed by things that have happened in the city;
but to her the reasons of his hope or fear are not communicated, nor
would she understand them if they were. His mind speaks a language
foreign to her; his daily operations in the city have for her only the
remote interest of things that have happened in a foreign country,
which appear too unreal to excite any sincere sympathy or apprehension.
Is this divided life good for either party?

Were some curious observer from another planet to arrive in London, I
think few things would appear to him so extraordinary as a London
suburb at noonday. By ten o'clock in the morning at latest he would
see it denuded of all its male inhabitants. Like that fabulous realm
of Tennyson's _Princess_, it is a realm inhabited by women; and the
only male voice left in the land is the voice of the milk-boy on his
rounds, the necessary postman, and the innocuous grocer's tout. There
is something of the 'hushed seraglio' in these miles of trim houses,
from whose doors and windows only female faces look out. An air of
sensible bereavement lies upon the land. Woman, deprived of her lord
and natural complement, cuts but a poor figure anywhere, but nowhere so
poor as in a wide realm populous with grass widows. By what interests