My wife, when we were first married, she worked at the Music Hall, and the man who was her boss – a Russian, would keep her after hours. He wouldn’t come to work until noon; she came to work at 9:00, and her hours were from 9:00 until 5:00; but he didn’t come until 12:00, and he liked to work late at night, and just as she was about to go home, he would call her into his office and say, Billie, I want you to do this, that, and the other, — and delay her dinner by an hour and a half, two hours, or more. And she resented this attitude of this man; so I said to her, “Why, Darling, as long as you are going to act this way towards him, he has to respond in like kind. You know the law; he doesn’t. So he makes a fortune, and you don’t make a fortune, but you are an artist.” She was a designer for the costumes that appeared on the stage of the Music Hall for eleven years. So, I said, “Talk to him as though he had praised you for your work. This morning when you go to work” – we were only five blocks from the Music Hall where we lived on 55th Street – “as you walk down Sixth Avenue, make a mental picture of him walking with you and hear his voice” – it’s a distinctive Russian voice – “and have him in his own broken English tell you how thrilled he is with your designs – so much so that he wants to use all of them, but the budget does not allow it; yet he wants to use every one you’ve brought down. How would you feel if he wanted all of them, and not take just two or three and send you back to your office to bring another four or five; but he wants everyone that you have submitted?” She started doing it. Do you know? It wasn’t 24 hours that his attitude changed towards Bill, and remained changed because she changed it.459 ¶21