and being free from the fuss of housekeeping, you expect to come home
and shuffle into your slippers, and snooze over the evening paper--if
it were possible to snooze over the exciting and respectable evening
journal you take--while we are to sew, and talk with you if you are
talkative, and darn the stockings, and make tea. You come home tired,
and likely enough, surly, and gloom about like a thundercloud if
dinner isn't ready for you the instant you are ready for it, and then
sit mum and eat it; and snap at the children, and show yourselves the
selfish, ugly things you are. Am _I_ to have no fun, never go to
the opera, never go to a ball, never have a party at home? Men are
tyrants, Mr. Potiphar. They are ogres who entice us poor girls into
their castles, and then eat up our happiness and scold us while they
eat."

Well, I suppose it is so. I suppose I am an ogre and enticed Polly
into my castle. But she didn't find it large enough, and teased me to
build another. I suppose she does sit with me in the evening, and
sew, and make tea, and wait upon me. I suppose she does, but I've not
a clear idea of it. I know it's unkind of me, when I have been hard
at work all day, trying to make and secure the money that gives her
and her family everything they want, and which wearies me body and
soul, to expect her to let me stay at home, and be quiet. I know I
ought to dress and go into Gnu's house, and smirk at his wife, and
stand up in a black suit before him attired in the same way, and talk
about the same stocks that we discussed down town in the morning in
colored trowsers. That's a social duty, I suppose. And I ought to see
various slight young gentlemen whirl my wife around the room, and hear
them tell her when they stop, that it's very warm. That's another
social duty, I suppose. And I must smile when the same young gentlemen
put their elbows into my stomach, and hop on my feet in order to