was
almost pathetic in his apologies for being unable to "show her a good
time." And he wanted her soothing. He was more and more afraid of her as
the despair of the jobless man in the hard city settled down on him. He
wanted her to agree with him that there was a conspiracy against him.

She listened to him and said nothing, till he would burst out in abuse:

"You women that have been in business simply ain't fit to be married.
You think you're too good to help a man. Yes, even when you haven't been
anything but dub stenographers. I never noticed that you were such a
whale of a success! I don't suppose you remember how you used to yawp to
me about the job being too much for you! And yet when I want a little
sympathy you sit there and hand me the frozen stare like you were the
president of the Standard Oil Company and I was a bum office-boy. Yes,
sir, I tell you business simply unfits a skirt for marriage."

"No," she said, "not for marriage that has any love and comradeship in
it. But I admit a business woman doesn't care to put up with being a cow
in a stable."

"What the devil do you mean--"

"Maybe," she went on, "the business women will bring about a new kind of
marriage in which men will _have_ to keep up respect and courtesy.... I
wonder--I wonder how many millions of women in what are supposed to be
happy homes are sick over being chambermaids and mistresses till they
get dulled and used to it. Nobody will ever know. All these books about
women being emancipated--you'd think marriage had changed entirely. Yet,
right now, in 1912, in Panama and this hotel--not changed a bit. The
business women must simply _compel_ men to--oh, to shave!"

She went out (perhaps she slammed the door a little, in an unemancipated
way) to Mrs. Wade's room.

That discussion was far more gentle and coherent than most of their
quarrels.

It may have been rather to the credit of Mr. Schwirtz--it may have been
a remnant of the clean pride which the boy Eddie Schwirtz must once have
had, that, whenever she hinted that she would like to go back to
work--he raged: "So you think I can't support you, eh? My God! I can
stand insults from all my old friends--the fellas that used to be
tickled to death to have me buy 'em a drink, but now they dodge around
the corner as though they thought I was going to try to borrow four bits
from 'em--I can stand their insults, but, by God! it _is_ pretty hard on
a man when his own wife lets him know t