Angela's Business

ANGELA'S BUSINESS




I


Being an author actually at work, and not an author being photographed
at work by a lady admirer, he did not gaze large-eyed at a poppy in a
crystal vase, one hand lightly touching his forehead, the other tossing
off page after page in high godlike frenzy. On the contrary, the young
man at the table yawned, lolled, sighed, scratched his ear, read
snatches of Virginia Carter's "Letters to My Girl Friends" in the
morning's "Post," read snatches of any printed matter that happened to
be about, and even groaned. When he gazed, it was at no flower, but more
probably at his clock, a stout alarm-clock well known to the trade as
"Big Bill"; and the clock gazed back, since there was a matter between
them this evening, and seemed to say, "Well, are you going to the
Redmantle Club, or are you _not_?" But that was precisely the point
on which the young man at the table had not yet made up his mind.

Of course, if he went to the Redmantle Club, he could not possibly spend
the whole evening here, writing, and, oddly enough, this was at once a
cogent reason for staying away from the Redmantle Club, and a seductive
argument for going to the same. No lady admirer could ever grasp this
paradox, but every true writer must admit that I know his secret
perfectly.

From time to time, no diversion offering, the author would read over the
last sentence he had written, which very likely ran as follows:--

We have a society organized on the agreeable assumption that
every woman, at twenty-five or thereabouts, finds herself in
possession of a home, a husband, and three darling little
curly-headed children.

Stimulated a trifle, he would thereupon sharpen up his pencil and charge
forward a few sentences, as now:--

Slipshod people never test such old assumptions against
actuality; they cling to what their grandfathers said, and call
their slipshodness conservatism. So (like ostriches) they avoid
the fact that there are three large and growing classes of
women who simply have no relation to their comfortable old
theory. I refer, of course, to the classes of Temporary
Spinsters, of Permanent Spinsters, and of Married but
Idle--childless wives living in boarding-houses, for example.
Let no Old Tory conceive that he has disposed of the Woman
Question until he can plainly answer: What are all these
various women to DO in their fifteen waking hours a day?