Time & Perspective Quote by Alice Duer Miller

Jealousy rarely sounds so jaunty. Miller rigs this little rhyme like a popular song you catch yourself humming, then realize it’s narrating a social trap. The sing-song meter and clipped, conversational diction (“busy,” “spare you a moment”) mimic gossip’s easy certainties: you don’t need evidence, just a pattern. And the punchline lands with the blunt efficiency of a proverb - “it means a man” - as if male attention is the only plausible explanation for a woman’s sudden privacy.

That’s the intent: to expose how quickly women’s autonomy gets translated into romance, and how surveillance is baked into “friendship” and community. The speaker isn’t a villain; she’s a mouthpiece for a culture that treats women’s time as public property. “A woman like that whom I’ve seen so much” is doing quiet work: familiarity becomes entitlement. When access disappears, it can’t simply mean fatigue, boundaries, ambition, illness, or boredom. The rhyme insists on a narrative tidy enough to preserve the onlooker’s self-importance.

Context matters. Miller wrote in an era when women’s expanding public lives - education, work, suffrage politics, urban social scenes - unsettled older scripts. The poem’s wink is that modernity hasn’t killed the old reflex; it’s updated it. “Always busy” should read as competence and agency. Instead it’s framed as a cover story. Miller’s satire catches the whole mechanism: a woman’s absence becomes a referendum on her desirability, and a man becomes the cultural alibi for her having a life.