What a woman wants most of all--this, of course, is merely a quotation from Mrs.Rasselyer-Brown's own thoughts as expressed to her three hundred friends--is room to expand, to grow.

The hardest thing in the world is to be stifled: and there is nothing more stifling than a husband who doesn't know a Giotto from a Carlo Dolci, but who can distinguish nut coal from egg and is never asked to dinner without talking about the furnace.
These, of course, were early trials.

They had passed to some extent, or were, at any rate, garlanded with the roses of time.
But the drag remained.
Even when the retail coal and wood stage was long since over, it was hard to have to put up with a husband who owned a coal mine and who bought pulp forests instead of illuminated missals of the twelfth century.

A coal mine is a dreadful thing at a dinner-table.

It humbles one so before one's guests.
It wouldn't have been so bad--this Mrs.Rasselyer-Brown herself admitted--if Mr.Rasselyer-Brown _did_ anything.