een through the closets. They
must be cleaned first.--I hate to clean closets! I hate to cook, to
sew, to iron, to dust, to scrub! There are women who {135} like these
occupations. Let such people assume them!"

"I can hear you, Clarissa, if you speak less oratorically. We are not
in an audience-room," suggested her husband.

Clarissa was slender, fair, and dramatic. If she was in the room you
looked at her. Her Norman nose was delicately cut, her manner
fastidious, but her collars were carelessly put on, and her neckties
had a vaguely one-sided effect. She just escaped being pretty and
precise and reliable-looking by a narrow margin, but escape she did.
She was, instead, disturbing, distracting, decidedly lovable, not a
little pathetic. Her face was dreamy, yet acute--the face of an
enthusiast. The line of her jaw was firmly and beautifully drawn; her
intellectual activity was undeniable, but philistines {136} mistrusted
her conclusions at sight--and justly.

"This is not a good day on which to hold an argument," she went on
with dignity, ignoring her husband's sub-acid comment. "It is too easy
to be uncivil when one is so uncomfortable. But I have been thinking
about these matters for a long time. I have been forming my
resolutions. They are not lightly taken. I was almost ready, in any
event, to tell you that I had decided to renounce the domestic life."

"To--?"

"To renounce the domestic life," repeated Clarissa with emphasis.
"Homes are an anachronism at the end of the nineteenth century,
anyhow. It is time women had the courage of their convictions and
sloughed off an anti-social form of habitat that dates from the Stone
Age."

{137}

"Do you mean you would rather _board?_"

Clarissa stared. "What has boarding to do with it?" she inquired
rather haughtily. "I am talking about the universal problem of woman's
work. One's own individual makeshifts do not affect that. But if it is
ever to be solved, some woman must solve it. Men never will.
Sacrifices will have to be made for it, as for other causes. There are
women who are ready to make them--and I have discovered that I am one
of the women."

Professor Charleroy received this statement in absolute silence.

"As a temporary alleviation," Clarissa went on meditatively, "families
might be associated upon some group-system. The operating expenses of
the individual establishments would be greatly reduced, and the
surplus {138} could be applied to developi