th I've put into the product I
offer you,' he says to the public, and it's true."

"Oh, well, if I couldn't do business there'd be an end of the matter,
and none of your horrible prophecies would come true."

"Your wife wouldn't let you."--Dr. Melton took up another line of
attack--"she'd want a motor-car and 'nice' associates and a fashionable
school for the children, and a home in the 'respectable' part of town."

Rankin's easy-going manner changed. He sat up and frowned. "There you
step on one of my corns, Doctor"--he did not apologize for the rustic
metaphor--"I don't believe a single, solitary identical word of that.
It's my most hotly held conviction that women are so much like humans
that you can't tell the difference with a microscope. I mean, if they're
interested in petty, personal things it's because they're not given a
fair chance at big, impersonal things. Everybody's jumping on the
American woman because she knows more about bridge-whist than about her
husband's business. _Why_ does she? Because he's satisfied to have
her--you can take my word for it! He likes her to be absorbed in clubs
and bridge and idiotic little dabblings in near-culture and pseudo-art,
just for the reason that a busy mother gives her baby a sticky feather
to play with. It keeps the baby busy. It keeps his wife's attention off
him. It's the American man just as much as the woman who's mortally
afraid of a sure-enough marriage with sure-enough shared interests. He
doesn't want to bother with children, or with the servant problem or the
questions of family life, and he doesn't want his wife bothering him in
his business any more than she wants him interfering with hers. That
idea of the matter is common to them both."

"That's a fine, chivalric view of the situation," said the doctor
sardonically. "Maybe if you'd practiced as long in as many American
families as I have, you might have a less idealistic view of your female
compatriots."

"I don't idealize 'em," cried Rankin. "Good Lord! Don't I say they're
just like men? They amount to something if they're given something worth
while to do--not otherwise."

"Don't you call bringing up children worth while?"

"You bet I do. So much so that I'd have the fathers take their full half
of it. I'd have men do more inside the house and less outside, and the
women the other way 'round."

The doctor recoiled at this. "Oh, you're a visionary. It couldn't be
done."

"It couldn't be done i