Everyone agrees that in office or factory the square peg in a round hole is a calamity, but how hard it is to make them admit that the square peg in the home is just as bad. 

Some. of us, when we marry, take to housekeeping like ducks to the water, but when we don't and just muddle miserably on, longing for the job we can do, then our marriage is heading for the rocks. 

Take Phyllida, for instance, whom I met the other day for the first time since our student days. 

"How's your designing?" I asked, when the first questions were over,and we had both owned to marriage and motherhood, for in the old days we had dreamt of fame for her posters and my stories. 

Phyllida blushed. "It just had to go," she confessed. "There's the house and the baby--" 

"you find housework more interesting?" I hinted. 

"I hate it," she flashed, "but I get through the ordinary work pretty well. It is having no spare time that makes me miserable. I long to get at my paints when an idea comes, but baby must go for walks in the afternoons, and there always seems mending for the evenings. Haven't you found it the same?" 

"Come and have tea, you shocking waster of talent!" said I, and one the teacups we faced the problem. 

"Never, never," said I, "settle down to being a square peg without a fight. You know you can draw -- well, draw in the afternoons, and let a nice girl, who will enjoy it anyway, take baby for her rides. I've bought time for the writing I love, in spite of two children, by passing on the sewing I hate." 

Phyllida looked interested. "Don't you even darn socks?" she enquired. 

"Never a one," I said, firmly. "I am not a good needlewoman and I face it, with the result that a really competent one comes in once a week. In an afternoon she clears the pile that would hang ee my week's evenings, and since she likes the children, and they like her, she willingly agrees, for a little extra, to run up clothes for them in a way I could not possibly copy. While she turns the sewing-machine, I tap away at mine, and earn enough by my stories and articles easily to pay her wages. I know now that I shall never be famous, but I love my writing, and because I am happy and contented, so are Jim and the children. No one, husband or child, can be happy with a square peg.

" Phyllida was deep in thought. "Even two afternoons a week --" she murmured, half to herself, "quite free, and undisturbed --" ‘

She looked up at me smiling, and held out her hand. "I'll do it somehow," she promised. "No more square pegs for me."