Sinclair Lewis

“ So far as Una could calculate, he had less than forty dollars. She burst out on him. She seemed to be speaking with the brusque voice of an accomplishing man. In that voice was all she had ever heard from executives; all the subconsciously remembered man-driving force of the office world. She ordered him to go and take the job in the paint-shop—at eighteen dollars a week, or eight dollars a week. ”

“ If any one moment of life is more important than the others, this may have been her crisis, when her husband had become a begging pauper and she took charge; began not only to think earnest, commonplace, little Una thoughts about “mastering life,” but actually to master it. ”

“ Somebody in this family has got to economize!—while you sit here cool and comfortable; not a thing on your mind but your hair; not a thing to worry about except thinking how damn superior you are to your husband! ”

“ She saw that, felt his resentment. But she more and more often invited an ambition to go back to work, to be independent and busy, no matter how weary she might become. To die, if need be, in the struggle. ”

“ Well, ain’t you going to come and kiss me? Nice reception when a man’s come home tired from a hard trip—wife so busy reading a book that she don’t even get up from her chair and make him welcome in his own room that he pays for. ”

“ I don’t hardly touch a drop, except maybe just for sociability. God! this temperance wave gets my goat! Lot of hot-air females telling me what I can do and what I can’t do—fella that knows when to drink and when to stop. Drink? Why, you ought to see some of the boys! There’s Burke McCullough. Say, I bet he puts away forty drinks a day, if he does one, and I don’t know that it hurts him any; but me—”
“Yes, I know, dear. I was just thinking—maybe your boss is one of the temperance cranks,” Una interrupted. Mr. Schwirtz’s arguments regarding the privileges of a manly man sounded very familiar. ”

“ Oh, I’m hysterical; I’m mad. I can’t believe I am what I am—and yet I am!... Now he’s getting that fifty and buying a drink—”
§ 4
Mr. Schwirtz actually came home with forty-five out of the fifty intact. That was because he wanted to be able to pay the hotel-manager and insultingly inform him that they were going to leave.... The manager bore up under the blow.... They did move to a “furnished housekeeping-room” on West Nineteenth Street—in the very district of gray rooms and pathetic landladies where Una had sought a boarding-house after the death of her mother. ”

“ Kid, can’t you understand that there are wives who’ve got so much passion in’em that if their husbands came home clean-licked, like I am, they’d—oh, their husbands would just naturally completely forget their troubles in love—real love, with fire in it. Women that aren’t ashamed of having bodies.... ”

“ 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! ”