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A college professor—as may be proved by any number of novels and plays—is a quaint, pedantic person, with spectacles and a beard, but without any passions—except for books. He takes delight in large fat words, but is utterly indifferent to such things as clothes and women—except the dowdy one he married when too young to know better…. It is always so interesting to see ourselves as authors see us.

Even more entertaining to us, however, is the shockingly inconsistent attitude toward academic life maintained by practical people who know all about real life—meaning the making and spending of money.

One evening soon after I became a college professor’s wife I enjoyed the inestimable privilege of sitting next to one of America’s safest and sanest business men at a dinner party given in his honor by one of the trustees of the university.

When he began to inform me, with that interesting air of originality which often accompanies the platitudes of our best citizens, that college professors were “mere visionary idealists—all academic theories; no practical knowledge of the world”—and so on, as usual—I made bold to interrupt:

“Why, in the name of common sense, then, do you send your own sons to them to be prepared for it! Is such a policy safe? Is it sane? Is it practical?” And I am afraid I laughed in the great man’s face.

He only blinked and said “Humph!” in a thoroughly businesslike manner; but throughout the rest of the evening he viewed me askance, as though I had become a dangerous theorist too—by marriage. So I turned my back on him and wondered why such a large and brilliant dinner was given for such a dull and uninteresting Philistine!

This shows, by the way, how young and ignorant I was. The mystery was explained next day, when it was intimated to me that I had made what is sometimes called, even in refined college circles, a break. Young professors’ wives were not expected to trifle with visitors of such eminent solvency; but I had frequently heard the materialistic tendencies of the age condemned in public, and had not been warned in private that we were all supposed to do our best to work this materialist for a million, with which to keep up the fight against materialism.

In the cloistered seclusion of our universities, dedicated to high ideals, more deference is shown to the masters of high finance than to the masters of other arts—let me add not because Mammon is worshiped, but because he is needed for building cloisters.

The search for truth would be far more congenial than the search for wealth; but, so long as our old-fashioned institutions remain, like old-fashioned females, dependent for their very existence on the bounty of personal favor, devious methods must be employed for coaxing and wheedling money out of those who control it—and therefore the truth.

I was a slender bride and had a fresh, becoming trousseau. He was a heavy-jowled banker and had many millions. I was supposed to ply what feminine arts I could command for the highly moral purpose of obtaining his dollars, to be used in destroying his ideals.

Well, that was the first and last time I was ever so employed. Despite the conscientious flattery of the others he gruntingly refused to give a penny. And—who knows—perhaps I was in part responsible for the loss of a million! A dreadful preface to my career as a college professor’s wife.

However, before pursuing my personal confessions, I must not overlook the most common and comic characteristic of the college professor we all know and love in fiction. I refer to his picturesque absent-mindedness. I had almost forgotten that; possibly I have become absent-minded by marriage too! Is not the dear old fellow always absent-minded on the stage? Invariably and most deliriously! Just how he manages to remain on the Faculty when absent-minded is never explained on the program; and it often perplexes us who are behind the scenes.

I tell my husband that, in our case, I, as the dowdy and devoted wife, am supposed to interrupt his dreams—they always have dreams—remove his untidy dressing gown—they always wear dressing gowns—and dispatch him to the classroom with a kiss and a coat; but how about that great and growing proportion of his colleagues who, for reasons to be stated, are wifeless and presumably helpless?

Being only a woman, I cannot explain how bachelors retain their positions; but I shall venture to assert that no business in the world—not even the army and navy—is conducted on a more ruthless and inexorable schedule than the business of teaching.

My two brothers drift into their office at any time between nine and ten in the morning and yet control a fairly successful commercial enterprise; whereas, if my husband arrived at his eight-o’clock classroom only one minute late there would be no class there to teach. For it is an unwritten law among our engaging young friends the undergraduates that when the “prof” is not on hand before the bell stops ringing they can “cut”—thus avoiding what they were sent to college for and achieving one of the pleasantest triumphs of a university course.

My confessions! Dear me! What have I, a college professor’s wife, to confess? At least three things:

1—That I love my husband so well that I wish I had never married him.

2—That I have been such a good wife that he does not know he ought never to have had one.

3—That if I had to do it all over again I would do the same thing all over again! This is indeed a confession, though whether it be of weakness of will or strength of faith you may decide if you read the rest.

The first time I saw the man who became my husband was at the Casino in Newport. And what was a poor professor doing at Newport? He was not a professor—he was a prince; a proud prince of the most royal realm of sport. Carl, as some of you might recall if that were his real name, had been the intercollegiate tennis champion a few years before, and now, with the kings of the court, had come to try his luck in the annual national tournament. He lasted until the finals this time and then was put out. That was as high as he ever got in the game.

Alas for the romance of love at first sight! He paid not the slightest attention to me, though he sat beside me for ten minutes; for, despite his defeat, he was as enthusiastically absorbed in the runner-up and the dashing defender of the title as—well, as the splendid sportsman I have since found him to be in disappointments far more grim.

As for me, I fear I hardly noticed him either, except to remark that he was very good-looking; for this was my first visit to Newport—the last too—and the pageantry of wealth and fashion was bewilderingly interesting to me. I was quite young then. I am older now. But such unintellectual exhibitions might, I fancy, still interest me—a shocking confession for a college professor’s wife!

I did not see Carl again for two years, and then it was in another kind of pageant, amid pomp and circumstance of such a different sort; and, instead of white flannel trousers, he now wore a black silk gown. It had large flowing sleeves and a hood of loud colors hanging down behind; and he was blandly marching along in the academic procession at the inaugural ceremonies of the new president of the university.

I wonder why it is that when the stronger sex wishes to appear particularly dignified and impressive, as on the bench or in the pulpit, it likes to don female attire! No matter whether suffragists or antis—they all do it. Now some of these paraders seemed as embarrassed by their skirts as the weaker sex would be without them; but the way Carl wore his new honors and his new doctor’s hood attracted my attention and held it. He seemed quite aware of the ridiculous aspect of an awkward squad of pedagogues paraded like chorus girls before an audience invited to watch the display; but, also, he actually enjoyed the comedy of it—and that is a distinction when you are an actor in the comedy! His quietly derisive strut altogether fascinated me. “Hurrah! Aren’t we fine!” he seemed to say.

As the long, self-conscious procession passed where I sat, smiling and unnoticed, he suddenly looked up. His veiled twinkle happened to meet my gaze. It passed over me, instantly returned and rested on ray eyes for almost a second. Such a wonderful second for little me!… Not a gleam of recollection. He had quite forgotten that our names had once been pronounced to each other; but in that flashing instant he recognized, as I did, that we two knew each other better than anyone else in the whole assemblage.

The nicest smile in the world said as plainly as words, and all for me alone: “Hurrah! You see it too!” Then, with that deliciously derisive strut, he passed on, while something within me said: “There he is!—at last! He is the one for you!” And I glowed and was glad.

Carl informed me afterward that he had a similar sensation, and that all through the long platitudinous exercises my face was a great solace to him.

“Whenever they became particularly tiresome,” he said, “I looked at you—and bore up.”

I was not unaware that he was observing me; nor was I surprised when, at the end of the exhausting ordeal, he broke through the crowd—with oh, such dear impetuosity!—and asked my uncle to present him, while I, trembling at his approach, looked in the other direction, for I felt the crimson in my cheeks—I who had been out three seasons! Then I turned and raised my eyes to his, and he, too, colored deeply as he took my hand.

We saw no comedy in what followed.

There was plenty of comedy, only we were too romantic to see it. At the time it seemed entirely tragic to me that my people, though of the sort classified as cultured and refined, deploring the materialistic tendency of the age, violently objected to my caring for this wonderful being, who brilliantly embodied all they admired in baccalaureate sermons and extolled in Sunday-school.

It was not despite but because of that very thing that they opposed the match! If only he had not so ably curbed his materialistic tendencies they would have been delighted with this well-bred young man, for his was an even older family than ours, meaning one having money long enough to breed contempt for making it. Instead of a fortune, however, merely a tradition of noblesse oblige had come down to him, like an unwieldy heirloom. He had waved aside a promising opening in his cousin’s bond-house on leaving college and invested five important years, as well as his small patrimony, in hard work at the leading universities abroad in order to secure a thorough working capital for the worst-paid profession in the world.

“If there were only some future in the teaching business!” as one of my elder brothers said; “but I’ve looked into the proposition. Why, even a full professor seldom gets more than four thousand—in most cases less. And it will be years before your young man is a full professor.”

“I can wait,” I said.

“But a girl like you could never stand that kind of life. You aren’t fitted for it. You weren’t brought up to be a poor man’s wife.”

“Plenty of tune to learn while waiting,” I returned gayly enough, but heartsick at the thought of the long wait.

Carl, however, quite agreed with my brothers and wanted impetuously to start afresh in pursuit of the career in Wall Street he had forsworn, willing and eager—the darling!—to throw away ambition, change his inherited tastes, abandon his cultivated talents, and forget the five years he had “squandered in riotous learning,” as he put it!

However, I was not willing—for his sake. He would regret it later. They always do. Besides, like Carl, I had certain unuttered ideals about serving the world in those days. We still have. Only now we better understand the world. Make no mistake about this. Men are just as noble as they used to be. Plenty of them are willing to sacrifice themselves—but not us. That is why so few of the sort most needed go in for teaching and preaching in these so-called materialistic days.

What was the actual, material result of my lover’s having taken seriously the advice ladled out to him by college presidents and other evil companions of his innocent youth, who had besought him not to seek material gain?

At the time we found each other he was twenty-seven years of age and had just begun his career—an instructor in the economics department, with a thousand-dollar salary. That is not why he was called an economist; but can you blame my brothers for doing their best to break the engagement?… I do not—now. It was not their fault if Carl actually practiced what they merely preached. Should Carl be blamed? No; for he seriously intended never to marry at all—until he met me. Should I be blamed? Possibly; but I did my best to break the engagement too—and incidentally both our hearts—by going abroad and staying abroad until Carl—bless him!—came over after me.

I am not blaming anybody. I am merely telling why so few men in university work, or, for that matter, in most of the professions nowadays, can support wives until after the natural mating time is past. By that time their true mates have usually wed other men—men who can support them—not the men they really love, but the men they tell themselves they love! For, if marriage is woman’s only true career, it is hardly true to one’s family or oneself not to follow it before it is too late—especially when denied training for any other—even though she may be equally lacking in practical training for the only career open to her.

This sounds like a confession of personal failure due to the typical unpreparedness for marriage of the modern American girl. I do not think anyone could call our marriage a personal failure, though socially it may be. During the long period of our engagement I became almost as well prepared for my lifework as Carl was for his. Instead of just waiting in sweet, sighing idleness I took courses in domestic science, studied dietetics, mastered double-entry and learned to sew. I also began reading up on economics. The latter amused the family, for they thought the higher education of women quite unwomanly and had refused to let me go to college.

It amused Carl too, until I convinced him that I was really interested in the subject, not just in him; then he began sending me boxes of books instead of boxes of candy, which made the family laugh and call me strong-minded. I did not care what they called me. I was too busy making up for the time and money wasted on my disadvantageous advantages, which may have made me more attractive to men, but had not fitted me to be the wife of any man, rich or poor.

All that my accomplishments and those of my sisters actually accomplished, as I see it now, was to kill my dear father; for, though he made a large income as a lawyer, he had an even larger family and died a poor man, like so many prominent members of the bar.

I shall not dwell on the ordeal of a long engagement. It is often made to sound romantic in fiction, but in realistic life such an unnatural relationship is a refined atrocity—often an injurious one—except to pseudo-human beings so unreal and unromantic that they should never be married or engaged at all. I nearly died; and as for Carl—well, unrequited affection may be good for some men, but requited affection in such circumstances cannot be good for any man—if you grant that marriage is!

A high-strung, ambitious fellow like Carl needed no incentive to make him work hard or to keep him out of mischief, any more than he needed a prize to make him do his best at tennis or keep him from cheating in the score. What an ignoble view of these matters most good people accept! In point of fact he had been able to do more work and to play better tennis before receiving this long handicap—in short, would have been in a position to marry sooner if he had not been engaged to marry! This may sound strange, but that is merely because the truth is so seldom told about anything that concerns the most important relationship in life.

Nevertheless, despite what he was pleased to call his inspiration, he won his assistant professorship at an earlier age than the average, and we were married on fifteen hundred a year.

Oh, what a happy year! I am bound to say the family were very nice about it. Everyone was nice about it. And when we came back from our wedding journey the other professors’ wives overwhelmed me with kindness and with calls—and with teas and dinners and receptions in our honor. Carl had been a very popular bachelor and his friends were pleased to treat me quite as if I were worthy of him. This was generous, but disquieting. I was afraid they would soon see through me and pity poor Carl.

I had supposed, like most outsiders, that the women of a university town would be dreadfully intellectual and modern—and I was rather in awe of them at first, being aware of my own magnificent limitations; but, for the most part, these charming new friends of mine, especially the wealthier members of the set I was thrown with, seemed guilelessly ignorant in respect of the interesting period of civilization in which they happened to live—almost as ignorant as I was and as most “nice people” are everywhere.

Books sufficiently old, art sufficiently classic, views sufficiently venerable to be respectable—these interested them, as did foreign travel and modern languages; but ideas that were modern could not be nice because they were new, though they might be nice in time—after they became stale. College culture, I soon discovered, does not care about what is happening to the world, but what used to happen to it.

“You see, my dear,” Carl explained, with that quiet, casual manner so puzzling to pious devotees of “cultureine”—and even to me at first, though I adored and soon adopted it! “—universities don’t lead thought—they follow it. In Europe institutions of learning may be—indeed, they frequently are—hotbeds of radicalism; in America our colleges are merely featherbeds for conservatism to die in respectably.” Then he added: “But what could you expect? You see, we are still intellectually nouveaux over here, and therefore self-consciously correct and imitative, like the nouveaux riches. So long as you have a broad a you need never worry about a narrow mind.”

As for the men, I had pictured the privilege of sitting at their feet and learning many interesting things about the universe. Perhaps they were too tired to have their feet encumbered by ignorant young women; for when I ventured to ask questions about their subject their answer was—not always—but in so many cases a solemn owllike “yes-and-no” that I soon learned my place. They did not expect or want a woman to know anything and preferred light banter and persiflage. I like that, too, when it is well done; but I was accustomed to men who did it better.

I preferred the society of their wives. I do not expect any member of the complacent sex to believe this statement—unless I add that the men did not fancy my society, which would not be strictly true; but, even if not so intellectual as I had feared, the women of our town were far more charming than I had hoped, and when you cannot have both cleverness and kindness the latter makes a more agreeable atmosphere for a permanent home. I still consider them the loveliest women in the world.

In short my only regret about being married was that we had wasted so much of the glory of youth apart. Youth is the time for love, but not for marriage! Some of our friends among the instructors marry on a thousand a year, even in these days of the high cost of living; and I should have been so willing to live as certain of them do—renting lodgings from a respectable artisan’s wife and doing my own cooking on her stove after she had done hers.

Carl gave me no encouragement, however! Perhaps it was just as well; for when first engaged I did not know how to cook, though I was a good dancer and could play Liszt’s Polonaise in E flat with but few mistakes.

As it turned out we began our wedded life quite luxuriously. We had a whole house to ourselves—and sometimes even a maid! In those days there were no flats in our town and certain small but shrewd local capitalists had built rows of tiny frame dwellings which they leased to assistant professors, assistant plumbers, and other respectable people of the same financial status, at rates which enabled them—the owners, not the tenants—to support charity and religion.

They were all alike—I refer to the houses now, not to all landlords necessarily—with a steep stoop in front and a drying yard for Monday mornings in the rear, the kind you see on the factory edges of great cities—except that ours were cleaner and were occupied by nicer people.

One of our next-door neighbors was a rising young butcher with his bride and the house on the other side of us was occupied by a postman, his progeny, and the piercing notes of his whistle—presumably a cast-off one—on which all of his numerous children, irrespective of sex or age, were ambitiously learning their father’s calling, as was made clear through the thin dividing wall, which supplied visual privacy but did not prevent our knowing when they took their baths or in what terms they objected to doing so. It became a matter of interesting speculation to us what Willie would say the next Saturday night; and if we had quarreled they, in turn, could have—and would have—told what it was all about.

“Not every economist,” Carl remarked whimsically, “can learn at first hand how the proletariat lives.”

I, too, was learning at first hand much about my own profession. My original research in domestic science was sound in theory, but I soon discovered that my dietetic program was too expensive in practice. Instead of good cuts of beef I had to select second or third quality from the rising young butcher, who, by the way, has since risen to the dignity of a touring car. Instead of poultry we had pork, for this was before pork also rose.

My courses in bookkeeping, however, proved quite practical; and I may say that I was a good purchasing agent and general manager from the beginning of our partnership, instead of becoming one later through bitter experience, like so many young wives brought up to be ladies, not general houseworkers.

Frequently I had a maid, commonly called along our row the “gurrul”—and quite frequently I had none; for we could afford only young beginners, who, as soon as I had trained them well, left me for other mistresses who could afford to pay them well.

“Oh, we should not accuse the poor creatures of ingratitude,” I told Carl one day. “Not every economist can learn at first hand the law of supply and demand.”

If, however, as my fashionable aunt in town remarked, we were picturesquely impecunious—which, to that soft lady, probably meant that, we had to worry along without motor cars—we were just as desperately happy as we were poor; for we had each other at least. Every other deprivation seemed comparatively easy or amusing.

Nor were we the only ones who had each other—and therefore poverty. Scholarship meant sacrifice, but all agreed that it was the ideal life.

To be sure, some members of the Faculty—or their wives—had independent means and could better afford the ideal life. They were considered noble for choosing it. Some of the alumni who attended the great games and the graduating exercises were enormously wealthy, and gave the interest of their incomes—sometimes a whole handful of bonds at a time—to the support of the ideal life.

Was there any law compelling them to give their money to their Alma Mater? No—just as there was none compelling men like Carl to give their lives and sacrifice their wives. These men of wealth made even greater sacrifices. They could have kept in comfort a dozen wives apiece—modest ones—on what they voluntarily preferred to turn over to the dear old college. Professors, being impractical and visionary, cannot always see these things in their true proportions.

We, moreover, in return for our interest in education, did we not shamelessly accept monthly checks from the university treasurer’s office? It was quite materialistic in us. Whereas these disinterested donors, instead of receiving checks, gave them, which is more blessed. And were they not checks of a denomination far larger than those we selfishly cashed for ourselves? Invariably. Therefore our princely benefactors were regarded not only as nobler but as the Nobility.

Indeed, the social stratification of my new home, where the excellent principles of high thinking and plain living were highly recommended for all who could not reverse the precept, struck me, a neophyte, as for all the world like that of a cathedral town in England, except that these visiting patrons of religion and learning were treated with a reverence and respect found only in America. Surely it must have amused them, had they not been so used to it; for they were quite the simplest, kindest, sweetest overrich people I had ever met in my own country—and they often took pains to tell us broad-mindedly that there were better things than money. Their tactful attempts to hide their awful affluence were quite appealing—occasionally rather comic. Like similarly conscious efforts to cover evident indigence, it was so palpable and so unnecessary.

“There, there!” I always wanted to say—until I, too, became accustomed to it. “It’s all right. You can’t help it.”

It was dear of them all the same, however, and I would not seem ungrateful for their kind consideration. After all, how different from the purse-proud arrogance of wealth seen in our best—selling—fiction, though seldom elsewhere.

For the most part they were true gentlefolk, with the low voices and simple manners of several generations of breeding; and I liked them, for the most part, very much—especially certain old friends of our parents, who, I learned later, were willing to show their true friendship in more ways than Carl and I could permit.

One is frequently informed that the great compensation for underpaying the college professor is in the leisure to live—otium cum dignitate as returning old grads call it when they can remember their Latin, though as most of them cannot they call it a snap.

Carl, by the way, happened to be the secretary of his class, and his popularity with dear old classmates became a nuisance in our tiny home. I remember one well-known bachelor of arts who answered to the name of Spud, a rather vulgar little man. Comfortably seated in Carl’s study one morning, with a cigar in his mouth, Spud began:

“My, what a snap! A couple of hours’ work a day and three solid months’ vacation! Why, just see, here you are loafing early in the morning! You ought to come up to the city! Humph! I’d show you what real work means.”

Now my husband had been writing until two o’clock the night before, so that he had not yet made preparation for his next hour. It was so early indeed that I had not yet made the beds. Besides, I had heard all about our snap before and it was getting on my nerves.

“Carl would enjoy nothing better than seeing you work,” I put in when the dear classmate finished; “but unfortunately he cannot spare the time.”

Spud saw the point and left; but Carl, instead of giving me the thanks I deserved, gave me the first scolding of our married life! Now isn’t that just like a husband?

Of course it can be proved by the annual catalogue that the average member of the Faculty has only about twelve or fourteen hours of classroom work a week—the worst-paid instructor more; the highest-paid professor less. What a university teacher gives to his students in the classroom, however, is or ought to be but a rendering of what he acquires outside, as when my distinguished father tried one of his well-prepared cases in court. Every new class, moreover, is a different proposition, as I once heard my brother say of his customers.

That is where the art of teaching comes in and where Carl excelled. He could make even the “dismal science,” as Carlyle called economics, interesting, as was proved by the large numbers of men who elected his courses, despite the fact that he made them work hard to pass. Nor does this take into account original research and the writing of books like Carl’s scholarly work on The History of Property, on which he had been slaving for three solid summers and hundreds of nights during termtime; not to speak of attending committee meetings constantly, and the furnace even more constantly. The latter, like making beds, is not mentioned in the official catalogue. I suppose such details would not become one’s dignity.

As in every other occupation, some members of the Faculty do as little work as the law requires; but most of them are an extremely busy lot, even though they may, when it suits their schedule better, take exercise in the morning instead of the afternoon—an astonishing state of affairs that always scandalizes the so-called tired business man.

As for Carl, I was seeing so little of him except at mealtimes that I became rather piqued at first, being a bride. I felt sure he did not love me any more!

“Do you really think you have a right to devote so much time to outside work?” I asked one evening when I was washing the dishes and he was starting off for the university library to write on his great book.—It was the indirect womanly method of saying: “Oh, please devote just a little more time to me!”—”You ought to rest and be fresh for your classroom work,” I added.

Being a man he did not see it.

“The way to advance in the teaching profession,” he answered, with his veiled twinkle, “is to neglect it. It doesn’t matter how poorly you teach, so long as you write dull books for other professors to read. That’s why it is called scholarship—because you slight your scholars.”

“Oh, I’m sick of all this talk about scholarship!” I cried. “What does it mean anyway?”

“Scholarship, my dear,” said Carl, “means finding out all there is to know about something nobody else cares about, and then telling it in such a way that nobody else can find out. If you are understood you are popular; if you are popular you are no scholar. And if you’re no scholar, how can you become a full professor? Now, my child, it is all clear to you.”

And, dismissing me and the subject with a good-night kiss, he brushed his last year’s hat and hurried off, taking the latchkey.

So much for otium.

“But where does the dignity come in?” I asked Carl one day when he was sharpening his lawnmower and thus neglecting his lawn tennis; for, like a Freshman, I still had much to learn about quaint old college customs.

“Why, in being called p’fessor by the tradesmen,” said Carl. “Also in renting a doctor’s hood for academic pee-rades at three dollars a pee-rade, instead of buying a new hat for the rest of the year. Great thing—dignity!”

He chuckled and began to cut the grass furiously, reminding me of a thoroughbred hunter I once saw harnessed to a plow.

“P’fessors of pugilism and dancing,” he went on gravely, “haven’t a bit more dignity than we have. They merely have more money. Just think! There isn’t a butcher or grocer in this town who doesn’t doff his hat to me when he whizzes by in his motor—even those whose bills I haven’t paid. It’s great to have dignity. I don’t believe there’s another place in the world where he who rides makes obeisance to him who walks. Much better than getting as high wages as a trustee’s chauffeur! A salary is so much more dignified than wages.”

He stopped to mop his brow, looking perfectly dignified.

“And yet,” he added, egged on by my laughter, for I always loved his quiet irony—it was never directed at individuals, but at the ideas and traditions they blandly and blindly followed—

“And yet carping critics of the greatest nation on earth try to make out that art and intellectuality are not properly recognized in the States. Pessimists! Look at our picture galleries, filled with old masters from abroad! Think how that helps American artists! Look at our colleges, crowded with buildings more costly than Oxford’s! Think how that encourages American teachers! Simply because an occasional foreign professor gets higher pay—bah! There are better things than money. For example, this!”

And he bent to his mower again, with much the same derisively dignified strut as on that memorable day long ago when I came and saw and was conquered by it—only then he wore black silk sleeves and now white shirtsleeves.

And so much for dignity.

I soon saw that if I were to be a help and not a hindrance to the man I loved I should have to depart from what I had been carefully trained to regard as woman’s only true sphere. Do not be alarmed! I had no thought of leaving home or husband. It is simply that the home, in the industrial sense, is leaving the house—seventy-five per cent of it social scientists say, has gone already—so that nowadays a wife must go out after it or else find some new-fashioned productive substitute if she really intends to be an old-fashioned helpmate to her husband.

It was not a feminist theory but a financial condition that confronted us. My done-over trousseau would not last forever, nor would Carl’s present intellectual wardrobe, which was becoming threadbare. Travel abroad and foreign study are just as necessary for an American scholar as foreign buying is for an American dealer in trousseaus.

I thought of many plans; but in a college town a woman’s opportunities are so limited. We are not paid enough to be ladies, though we are required to dress and act like them—do not forget that point. And yet, when willing to stop being a lady, what could one do?

Finally I thought of dropping entirely out of the social, religious and charitable activities of the town, investing in a typewriter and subscribing to a correspondence-school course in stenography. I could at least help Carl prepare his lectures and relieve him of the burden of letter writing, thus giving him more time for book reviewing and other potboiling jobs, which were not only delaying his own book but making him burn the candle at both ends in the strenuous effort to make both ends meet.

I knew Carl would object, but I had not expected such an outburst of profane rage as followed my announcement. The poor boy was dreadfully tired, and for months, like the thoroughbred he was, he had repressed his true feelings under a quiet, quizzical smile.

“My heavens! What next?” he cried, jumping up and pacing the floor. “Haven’t you already given up everything you were accustomed to—every innocent pleasure you deserve—every wholesome diversion you actually need in this God-forsaken, monotonous hole? Haven’t I already dragged you down—you, a lovely, fine-grained, highly evolved woman—down to the position of a servant in my house? And now, on top of all this—No, by God! I won’t have it! I tell you I won’t have it!”

It may be a shocking confession, but I loved him for that wicked oath. He looked so splendid—all fire and furious determination, as when he used to rush up to the net in the deciding game of a tennis match, cool and quick as lightning.

“You are right, Carl dear,” I said, kissing his profane lips; for I had learned long since never to argue with him. “I am too good to be a mere household drudge. It’s an economic waste of superior ability. That’s why I am going to be your secretary and save you time and money enough to get and keep a competent maid.”

“But I tell you—”

“I know, dear; but what are we going to do about it? We can’t go on this way. They’ve got us down—are we going to let them keep us down? Look into the future! Look at poor old Professor Culberson. Look at half of the older members of the Faculty! They have ceased to grow; their usefulness is over; they are all gone to seed—because they hadn’t the courage or the cash to develop anything but their characters!”

Carl looked thoughtful. He had gained an idea for his book and, like a true scholar, forgot for the moment our personal situation.

“Really, you know,” he mused, “does it pay Society to reward its individuals in inverse ratio to their usefulness?” He took out his pocket notebook and wrote: “Society itself suffers for rewarding that low order of cunning called business sense with the ultimate control of all other useful talents.” He closed his notebook and smiled.

“And yet they call the present economic order safe and sane! And all of us who throw the searchlight of truth on it—dangerous theorists! Can you beat it?”

“Well,” I rejoined, not being a scholar, “there’s nothing dangerous about my theory. Instead of your stenographer becoming your wife, your wife becomes your stenographer—far safer and saner than the usual order. Men are much more apt to fall in love with lively little typewriters than with fat, flabby wives.”

Though it was merely to make a poor joke out of a not objectionable necessity, my plan, as it turned out, was far wiser than I realized.

First, I surreptitiously card-catalogued the notes and references for Carl’s “epoch-making book,” as one of the sweet, vague wives of the Faculty always called her husband’s volumes, which she never read. Then I learned to take down his lectures, to look up data in the library, to verify quotations, and even lent a hand in the book reviewing.

Soon I began to feel more than a mere consumer’s interest—a producer’s interest—in Carl’s work. And then a wonderful thing happened: My husband began to see—just in time, I believe—that a wife could be more than a passive and more or less desirable appendage to a man’s life—an active and intelligent partner in it. And he looked at me with a new and wondering respect, which was rather amusing, but very dear.

He had made the astonishing discovery that his wife had a mind!

Years of piano practice had helped to make my fingers nimble for the typewriter, and for this advantage I was duly grateful to the family’s old-fashioned ideals, though I fear they did not appreciate my gratitude. Once, when visiting them during the holidays, I was laughingly boasting, before some guests invited to meet me at luncheon, about my part in the writing of Carl’s History of Property, which had been dedicated to me and was now making a sensation in the economic world, though our guests in the social world had never heard of it.

Suddenly I saw a curious, uncomfortable look come over the faces of the family. Then I stopped and remembered that nowadays wives—nice wives, that is—are not supposed to be helpmates to their husbands except in name; quite as spinsters no longer spin. They can help him spend. At that they are truly better halves, but to help him earn is not nice. To our guests it could mean only one thing—namely, that my husband could not afford a secretary. Well, he could not. What of it?

For a moment I had the disquieting sensation of having paraded my poverty—a form of vulgarity that Carl and I detest as heartily as a display of wealth.

The family considerately informed me afterward, however, that they thought me brave to sacrifice myself so cheerfully. Dear me! I was not being brave. I was not being cheerful. I was being happy. There is no sacrifice in working for the man you love. And if you can do it with him—why, I conceitedly thought it quite a distinction. Few women have the ability or enterprise to attain it!

One of my sisters who, like me, had failed to “marry well” valeted for her husband; but somehow that seemed to be all right. For my part I never could see why it is more womanly to do menial work for a man than intellectual work with him. I have done both and ought to know…. Can it be merely because the one is done strictly in the home or because no one can see you do it? Or is it merely because it is unskilled labor?

It is all right for the superior sex to do skilled labor, but a true womanly woman must do only unskilled labor, and a fine lady none at all—so clothed as to prevent it and so displayed as to prove it, thus advertising to the world that the man who pays for her can also pay for secretaries and all sorts of expensive things. Is that the old idea?

If so I am afraid most college professors’ wives should give up the old-fashioned expensive pose of ladyhood and join the new womanhood!

Well, as it turned out, we were enabled to spend our sabbatical year abroad—just in time to give Carl a new lease of life mentally and me physically; for both of us were on the verge of breaking down before we left.

Such a wonderful year! Revisiting his old haunts; attending lectures together in the German and French universities; working side by side in the great libraries; and meeting the great men of his profession at dinner! Then, between whiles, we had the best art and music thrown in! Ah, those are the only real luxuries we miss and long for! Indeed, to us, they are not really luxuries. Beauty is a necessity to some persons, like exercise; though others can get along perfectly well without it and, therefore, wonder why we cannot too.

Carl’s book had already been discovered over there—that is perhaps the only reason it was discovered later over here—and every one was so kind about it. We felt quite important and used to wink at each other across the table. “Our” book, Carl always called it, like a dear. His work was my work now—his ambitions, my ambitions; not just emotionally or inspirationally, but intellectually, collaboratively. And that made our emotional interest in each other the keener and more satisfying. We had fallen completely in love with each other. For the first time we two were really one. Previously we had been merely pronounced so by a clergyman who read it out of a book.

Oh, the glory of loving some one more than oneself! And oh, the blessedness of toiling together for something greater and more important than either! That is what makes it possible for the other thing to endure—not merely for a few mad, glad years, followed by drab duty and dull regret, but for a happy lifetime of useful vigor. That, and not leisure or dignity, is the great compensation for the professorial life.

What a joy it was to me during that rosy-sweet early period of our union to watch Carl, like a proud mother, as he grew and exfoliated—like a plant that has been kept in a cellar and now in congenial soil and sunshine is showing at last its full potentialities. Through me my boy was attaining the full stature of a man; and I, his proud mate, was jealously glad that even his dear dead mother could not have brought that to pass.

His wit became less caustic; his manner more genial. People who once irritated now interested him. Some who used to fear him now liked him. And as for the undergraduates who had hero-worshiped this former tennis champion, they now shyly turned to him for counsel and advice. He was more of a man of the world than most of his colleagues and treated the boys as though they were men of the world too—for instance, he never referred to them as boys.

“I wouldn’t be a damned fool if I were you,” I once overheard him say to a certain young man who was suffering from an attack of what Carl called misdirected energy.

More than one he took in hand this way; and, though I used to call it—to tease him—his man-to-man manner, I saw that it was effective. I, too, grew fond of these frank, ingenuous youths. We used to have them at our house when we could spare an evening—often when we could not.

None of this work, it may be mentioned, is referred to in the annual catalogue or provided for in the annual budget; and yet it is often the most vital and lasting service a teacher renders his students—especially when their silly parents provide them with more pocket money than the professor’s entire income for the support of himself, his family, his scholarship and his dignity.

“Your husband is not a professor,” one of them confided shyly to me—”he’s a human being!”

After the success of our book we were called to another college—a full professorship at three thousand a year! Carl loved his Alma Mater with a passion I sometimes failed to understand; but he could not afford to remain faithful to her forever on vague promises of future favor. He went to the president and said so plainly, hating the indignity of it and loathing the whole system that made such methods necessary.

The president would gladly have raised all the salaries if he had had the means. He could not meet the competitor’s price, but he begged Carl to stay, offering the full title—meaning empty—of professor and a minimum wage of twenty-five hundred dollars, with the promise of full pay when the funds could be raised.

Now we had demonstrated that, even on the Faculty of an Eastern college, two persons could live on fifteen hundred. Therefore, with twenty-five hundred, we could not only exist but work efficiently. So we did not have to go.

I look back on those days as the happiest period of our life together. That is why I have lingered over them. Congenial work, bright prospects, perfect health, the affection of friends, the respect of rivals—what more could any woman want for her husband or herself?

Only one thing. And now that, too, was to be ours! However, with children came trouble, for which—bless their little hearts!—they are not responsible. Were we? I wonder! Had we a right to have children? Had we a right not to have children? It has been estimated by a member of the mathematical department that, at the present salary rate, each of the college professors of America is entitled to just two-fifths of a child.

Does this pay? Should only the financially fit be allowed to survive—to reproduce their species? Should or should not those who may be fittest physically, intellectually and morally also be entitled to the privilege and responsibility of taking their natural part in determining the character of America’s future generations, for the evolution of the race and the glory of God?

I wonder!