How to Cook Husbands

A newspaper clipping sets it going: a mock recipe, credited to a Baltimore lady, telling wives to wrap a husband in clean linen, tie him in the kettle with a cord called Comfort, and simmer him over a steady fire of Love, Neatness and Cheerfulness. Sugar is encouraged. Vinegar is forbidden. Constance Leigh, thirty-four and unmarried, reads it beside her own fire and starts wondering what she would do with a husband if one ever turned up. She keeps her own house, manages her own business affairs, and is lonelier than she likes to admit. Two men eventually ask: a kind family friend of fifty-two, and Randolph Chance, a newspaperman too tongue-tied to get the words out. Between the courtships she watches the marriages around her, with opinions about every one.