Close at hand is a bridge over the River Thames, an admirable vantage ground for us to make a survey. The river flows beneath; barges pass, with timber, bursting with corn; there on one side are the domes and spires of the city; on the other, Westminster and the Houses of Parliament. It is a place to stand on by the hour, dreaming. But now we are pressed for time. Now we are here to consider facts; now we must fix our eyes upon the procession-the procession of the sons of educated There they go, our brothers who have been educated at public schools and universities, mounting those steps, passing in and out of those 5 doors, ascending those pulpits, preaching, teaching. administering justice, practicing medicine, making money. It is a solemn sight, always a pro now, for the past twenty crossing a desert. . . . By 0 years or so, it is no longer a sight merely, a graph, or fresco scrawled upon the walls of time, at which we can look with merely an esthetician along at the tail at the end of the procession, we go ourselves. And that 25 makes a difference. We who have looked so long at the pageant in books, or from a curtained window watched educated men leaving the house at about nine-thirty to go to an office, returning to the house at about six-thirty from an office, need look passively so no longer. We too can leave the house, can mount. those steps, pass in and out of those doors, . . . make money, administer justice. . . . We who now agitat le pens may in another century or two m a pulpit. Nobody will dare contradict us 5 then; we shall be the mouthpieces of the divine spirit-a solemn thought, is it not? Who can say whether, as time goes on, we may not dress in military uniform, with gold lace on our breasts, swords at our sides, and something like the old y coal-scuttle on our heads, save that that venerable object was never decorated with plumes of white horsehair. You laugh-indeed the shadow of the private house still makes those little queer. We have worn private clothes so 45 long. . . . But we have not come here to laugh, or to talk of fashions-men’s and women’s. We are here, on the bridge, to ask ourselves certain questions.

She had not played seriously since college. Accompanying the theater troupe’s performances and clowning around as her friend Parker picked out old Line Beatles songs on the piano didn’t count-that wasn’t 5 real music, music that made you forget where you were, made you forget where your arms and legs ended and a luscious sound began. She had started playing the cello when she was nine, shortly after the move to Arizona. At the beginning of 10 the school year in Akron, every child in fourth grade had been issued a pre-instrument called a tonette so the teacher could determine who had an “aptitude” for music. Virginia had liked the neatness of the tonette, its modest musical range and how it fit into her school 15 desk on the right side. Whenever she covered a fingerhole, she felt the contour of its slightly raised lip and imagined she was playing with the tentacle of an octopus. She had chafed through months of scales and 20 simple songs, waiting for the moment when she would walk across the auditorium stage and choose: kneel among the rows of somber black cases, undo the metal clasps and fling open the lid to reveal her instrument, a flute or a clarinet, glowing softly, half buried in deep 25 blue velvet. But before she could make her choice, they moved to Arizona. There, the music instruments were stored in a classroom trailer, and when she opened the flute case she nearly winced from the glare bouncing off all that polished silver, those gloating caps and hinges The clarinet was worse-it looked like an over-designed walking stick, sounded like a clown laughing, and had reeds that needed to be softened in spit. The music teacher shut the cases with a succession of curt clicks. “That leaves the strings,” she sighed, leading the way back through the noonday blaze and into the main building, where the violins, violas, cellos and double basses were housed. There, by virtue of its sonorous name, Virginia asked for the violoncello- and was too intimidated by the teacher’s growing impatience to protest when what emerged

The chart shows the duration of leisure enjoyed by men and women in a typical week in 1998-99, according to their gender and employment status. Generally speaking, male enjoyed more leisure time than women, and employed people had less free time for pastime activities than retired and unemployed people. Among the full-time employed people, men had about 45 hours of leisure time on an average per week compared to 38 hours for women. No data is given for the part-time employed men. Women from this category enjoyed 40 hours of leisure time in a week. This figure is slightly more than the employed women, perhaps because of their employment nature. Unemployed and retired people had the longest period of leisure activity both for men and women, and men had slightly more hours to spare than women. As expected, the retired and unemployed people enjoyed about 78 to 82 hours per week which is longer than people from other employment status. Lastly, housewives enjoyed approximately 50 hours of pastime which was more than the employed women but less than the unemployed and retired women.