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 being a wife? If you'd try to be the kind of wife that Eleanor Hickson is, for example, you'd have something to occupy you, all right. Why don't you do the kind of things with me that I want to do—for example—the things that rest me—the things that soothe my nerves—the things that make me fit to go back in the morning and put up a fight? God knows I need it. My job gets tougher every year. Now just look at Eleanor. She waits for old Charlie to come home like a mother for an only son. The first thing she does is to feel him out. If he craves golf, she's for it, if he'd rather smoke on the back porch and go to the theater in the evening she's for that; or if he just feels like shucking off into loose clothes and slippers and sitting around and playing five hundred with a pipe in his mouth that you can smell a mile, why she's for that and she plays the game with him, till he goes to sleep in his chair. If there's a dinner on when he doesn't feel up to a dinner, think she drags him out? Why, say, she'd make a thousand excuses to get him off. She'd lie like a devil to save him—save him, you understand!"

"You idiot!" reproached Mrs. Fay Judson, with a look of hot disdain. "To think of comparing me with a spiritless little echo like Eleanor Hickson."

But George was just getting warmed up to a whole series of helpful suggestions.