IV.The Wasters

PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE IN SERVING BREAKFASTS, DINNERS AND SUPPERS FOR A SMALL FAMILY, CLEVELAND.

THE GIRLS IN THE CLEVELAND TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOL LEARN TO MAKE POTTERY AS WELL AS TO MAKE DESIGNS.

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It follows, then, that cooking and sewing for girls in the elementary schools must be made just as rigorous a discipline for eye and hand as wood-working is for boys. It even follows that boys and girls will often get their manual training together.

It will not be a case of “household drudgery” for the girls while the boys are studying civics.

Somewhere in this chapter the reader will find a picture of the “living room” of the “model” house of the Washington-Allston Elementary School in Boston. The boys and girls of graduating grade in that school give four hours a week to matters connected with the welfare of that house. They have furnished it throughout with their own handiwork, the girls making pillow-cases, wall-coverings, window-curtains, etc., and the boys making chairs, tables, cupboards, etc. Succeeding classes will furnish it again.The reason why Mr. Crawford, the master of the school, chose to have a house for a manual training laboratory was simply that a house offers ampler opportunities than any other kind of place for instruction in the122practical efficiencies of daily living for both sexes.

The system will be complete when the girls get a bigger training in design by making more of the chairs, and when the boys get a bigger training in diet by doing more of the cooking.

We have now glanced at each of the three principal contributions made to modern education by the new study of the home. We have come to understand that much of each contribution will be for the male as well as for the female inhabitants of the home. If girls are to be led toward wisdom in the use of money, so are boys. If girls are to be habituated to the principles of Right Living, so again are boys. If girls have a need of manual training, with certain materials and implements, so boys, with perhaps other materials and implements, have a need of manual training, too.

UPPER PICTURE IS A CLASS IN FOOD ADULTERATIONS IN THE HOME ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.LOWER PICTURE IS THE LIVING ROOM OF THE “MODEL” HOUSE IN THE WASHINGTON-ALLSTON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, BOSTON.

It may be that in each case, except the last, there will be an ampler body of instruction for feminine than for masculine use. But the excess will be small enough to be absorbed without interference with general education of the123largest and most liberal sort. If this were not true by natural fact, it would have to be made true artificially. The body of home economics instruction could not be suffered to defeat its own ultimate mental purpose. The study of specialized techniques could not be permitted to narrow the spacious educational experience needed for that broadest of all generalities, the homemaker’s intelligent Consumption, Enjoyment, Use of all the world’s physical and spiritual commodities.

Surely we can now say with unanimous consent that Home Economics has revealed itself to be not a species of sex education but a species of vocational education. We miss its inmost intent, and we divert it from its mission, if we start with saying “Let us teach girls.” We have to start with saying “Let us teach Foods, Textiles, Hygiene.” We then ask “Who need to know about Foods, Textiles, Hygiene?” In answer, our largest group of scholars will come from among the prospective managers of households. But we are not teaching feminine accomplishments. We are teaching human life-tasks.

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Widening with this vocational principle, Miss Goodrich’s vision of the inclusion of both sexes in the courses of study now labeled “domestic-science-and-art” finds widening fulfilment. Side by side with young women in the Foods laboratory we shall see young men who are going to be chefs, dietitians, pure-food inspectors. In the Textiles laboratory we shall see young women who are going to sew at home, young women who are going to sew in factories, young men who are going to manufacture cloth. Hygiene will attract the sanitarian, the nurse, the hotel manager, trousered or petticoated.

We come thus face to face with the final development of the home economics movement. It issues into a double system. After providing, to the young, that general introduction to life at large which we have already detailed, it goes on, in its second phase, to provide immediate information of a more specialized character to scholars more matureat the time when that information is immediately needed. A large part of the home economics movement of the future will be the establishment of a system of continuous instruction for wives, mothers,125housekeepers, already entered upon their task of home-making and child-rearing.

The need of this development appears as soon as we take the sequence of events in a girl’s life and place it beside the sequence of events in a boy’s. If a boy is going to be a cotton-machinery engineer, a municipal sanitary expert, a food specialist, we do not give him his real technical finish till he is entering his trade. We may have given him, we ought to have given him, a vocational foundation of pertinent knowledge. But we do not give him the minutiæ of trade technique till he is at the point of practicing his trade or has already begun to practice it. This principle, applicable to the preparation for all trades whatsoever, sets limits to the amount of detailed preparation for home-making which can profitably be introduced, for most girls, into the curricula of schools and colleges.

In former chapters of this book we have seen that for most girls there is a gap, a large gap, between school and marriage, between girlhood and motherhood. We have seen, too, that this gap tends to be filled with money-earning work which demands a certain preparation of its own.126That point aside, however, the very existence of the gap in question, no matter how it may be filled, means that if we give a minute and elaborate preparation of home-making to girlhood we may wait five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, before we see wifehood and motherhood put that preparation to use.

Anybody who proposed to give a boy a minute and elaborate preparation for civil engineering a possible twenty years before he became a civil engineer and in contempt of the possible contingency of his not becoming a civil engineer at all, would hardly deserve to be called practical. Yet, in the name of practical education, we are sometimes asked to tolerate a correspondingly complete preparation for wifehood and motherhood at an age when both of those estates are mere prospects, distant and indefinite. We cannot believe that so extreme a demand will ever be acceded to by educators who have fully considered the modern postponement of marriage. Home economics, in schools and colleges, except for girls who are going to become teachers of it or who in other ways are going to make it their immediate money-earning work, must stop127with its broad applications to daily human living. So will it be useful, in different degrees, to both sexes and clash neither with general academic preparation nor with the preparation for self-support.

There will remain, unlearned, a great deal that modern science and modern sociology have to offer to the wife and mother. Let that great deal, in its more technical teachings, be learned when it can be carried forward into action.

The machinery of home economics instruction for adults is even now being erected, is even now being operated.

The Chicago School of Domestic Arts and Science, after much teaching of young girls, has established a “Housekeepers’ Association.” The members of that association are adult practicing housekeepers. The same school will soon establish a course in the study of the Care of Children. The pupils enrolled in that course will be mothers.

The fact is that science and sociology are so constantly amending and enlarging their teachings that a knowledge of what they taught twenty years ago is inadequate and a knowledge128of the minutiæ of what they taught twenty years ago is futile. The housekeeper of the future will have to keep on studying while housekeeping.

Several hundred housekeepers come each winter to the University of Wisconsin to attend the “Women’s Course in Home Economics.” They hear Professor Hastings talk about the “Production and Care of Milk.” They hear Dr. Evans talk about the “Prevention of Infant Mortality.” They hear Professor Marlatt talk about “Diets in Disease.” In each case they hear something very different from what they would have heard in their girlhood. For this reason alone, even if the gap between girlhood and motherhood did not exist, the machinery of home economics instruction for adults would have become necessary.

ONE-WEEK COURSES IN HOME ECONOMICS, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.

It is for adults that the United States Government issues such bulletins as “Modern Conveniences for the Farm Home.” It is for adults that Cornell University sends out its Farmers’ Wives’ Bulletins in editions of twenty thousand. It is for adults that Columbia University prints pamphlets like “The Feeding of129Children in a Family with an Income of $800 a Year.”

For adults, again, are such institutions as the American School of Home Economics, in Chicago, which, in the few years of its life, has enrolled more than 10,000 pupils in its correspondence courses.

For adults, finally, are the Homemakers’ Conferences held in conjunction with Farmers’ Institutes as well as the extension-course lectures given to local groups in city and in country by teachers sent out from state universities and agricultural colleges.

All this machinery, which here we do not attempt to describe but only to indicate, will some day find its scattered units associated and harmonized through the work of a Federal Bureau of Domestic Science and Art. Bills for the establishment of such a bureau have already been introduced into Congress. It will not be a cooking and sewing school for children. It will be a technical continuation school for adults. The National Congress of Mothers discerned one of its functions when it said: “The time has come when every nation through a130special department should provide data concerning infants which may be used by mothers everywhere.”

At the end of chapter two of this book we asked whether or not, in the field of education, the training for the home and the training for self-support would impose a double burden on the girl pupil. If our interpretation of the spirit of the home economics movement has been correct we may now say that the training for the home is so largely a training for life in general and is so distributed through different life-periods that it will not be felt to be burdensome at all. We may even go on to suggest that self-support and housekeeping, world and home, and the trainings for them, will merge for the girl into a progressive unified experience.

First. That part of home economics which can profitably be taught to the mass of pupils in elementary and high school and in the colleges, with its manual arts, its Right Living and its money-sense, will be helpful, much of it, to boys as well as to girls and will actually, since it develops the whole personality of the pupil, be part of the training for self-support itself.

MARRIED WOMEN AND WOMEN WHO WORK DURING THE DAY ATTEND THE EVENING COOKERY CLASSES IN THE ST. LOUIS HIGH SCHOOLS.

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Second. The years spent in self-support, in learning the world, will be part of the training for the home, because hereafter, as the Mary of our first chapter remarked, the mother who does not know the world cannot wisely rear boys up into it.

Third. After the period of self-support, when marriage comes, what further technical instruction the housekeeper and mother may need will be furnished to her by a system of adult education limitless in its possible growth.

135IV.The Wasters

It got talked around among Marie’s friends that she didn’t want children.

This was considered very surprising, in view of all that her father and husband had done for her.

Here is what they had done for her:

They had removed from her life all need, and finally all desire, to make efforts and to accomplish results through struggle in defiance of difficulty and at the cost of pain.

Work and pain were the two things Marie was on no account to be exposed to. With this small but important reservation:

She mightworkatavoidingpain.

When the cook had a headache she took Getting Breakfast for it. When Marie had a headache she worked not at breakfast but at the headache.

It was a social ceremony of large proportions,136with almost everybody among those present, from the doctor down through Mother and Auntie to Little Sister. The decorations, which were very elaborate, comprised, besides the usual tasteful arrangement of thermometers, eau-de-Karlsbad, smelling-salts bottles, cracked ice, and chocolate creams, a perfect shower of tourmaline roses, the odor of which, alone among all the vegetable odors in the world, had been found after long experimentation to be soothing to Marie on such occasions. It was not thought that Marie could vanquish a headache except after a plucky fight of at least one day’s duration.

Actresses go on and do their turns day after day and night after night with hardly a miss. Marie’s troubles were no more numerous than theirs. But they were much larger. Troubles are like gases. They expand to fill any void into which they are introduced. Marie’s spread themselves through a vacuum as large as her life.

The making of that vacuum and the inserting of Marie into it cost her father and her husband prodigious toil and was a great pleasure to137them. Marie belonged to the Leisure Class. Socially, she was therefore distinctly superior to her father and her husband.

WORK? FOR MARIE? FOR MY DAUGHTER? SHOCKING!

President Thomas of BrynMawr had Marie in mind when she said:

“By the leisured class we mean in America the class whose men work harder than any other men in the excitement of professional and commercial138rivalry, but whose women constitute the only leisured class we have and the most leisured class in the world.”

Marie’s father wasn’t so very rich, either. He was engaged in a business so vividly competitive that Marie’s brother was hurried through college as fast as possible and brought into the game at twenty-two with every nerve stretched taut.

Nothing like that was expected of Marie. She was brought up to think that leisure was woman’s natural estate. Work, for any girl, she regarded as an accident due to the unexpected and usually reprehensible collapse of the males of the poor girl’s family.

This view of the matter gave Marie,unconsciously to herself, what morality she had. Hard drinking, “illegitimate” gambling, and excessive dissipations of all sorts are observed commonly to have a prejudicial effect on male efficiency and on family prosperity. Against all “vices,” therefore (although she didn’t catch the “therefore”), Marie was a Moral Force of a million angel-power.

Aside from “vices,” however, all kinds of139conduct looked much alike to her. Ethics is the rules of the game, the decencies of the struggle for existence. Marie had no part in the struggle. She violated its decencies without being at all aware of it.

All the way, for instance, from stealing a place in the line in front of a box-office window ahead of ten persons who were there before her, up the tiny scale of petty aggressions within her narrow reach to the cool climax of spending three months every summer in a pine-wood mountain resort (thus depriving her city-bound husband of the personal companionship which was the one best thing she had to give him in return for what he gave her), she was as competent a little grafter as the town afforded.

But she was a perfectly logical one. Her family had trained her to deadhead her way through life and she did it. Finally she went beyond their expectations. They hadn’t quite anticipated all of the sweetly undeviating inertia of her mind.

Nevertheless she was a nice girl. In fact, she was The Nice Girl. She was sweet-tempered, sweet-mannered, and sweet-spoken—a140perfect dear. She never did a “bad” thing in her life. And she never ceased from her career of moral forcing. She wrote to her husband from her mountain fastness, warning him against high-balls in hot weather. She went twice a month during the winter to act as librarian for an evening at a settlement in a district which was inhabited by perfectly respectable working people but which, while she passed out the books, she sympathetically alluded to as a “slum.”

It is hardly fair, however, to lay the whole explanation of Marie on her father, her husband, and herself.

A few years ago, in the churchyard of St. Philip’s Church at Birmingham, they set up a tombstone which had fallen down, and they reinscribed it in honor of the long-neglected memory of the man who had been resting beneath it for a century and a half. His name was Wyatt. John Wyatt. He had a good deal to do with making Marie what she was.

What toil, what tossing nights, what sweating days, what agonized wrenching of the imagination toward a still unreached idea, have141gone into the making of leisure—for other people!

Wyatt strained toward, and touched, the idea which was the real start of modern leisure.

In the year 1733, coming from the cathedral town of Lichfield, where the Middle Ages still lingered, he set up, in a small building near Sutton Coldfields, a certain machine. That machine inaugurated, and forever symbolizes, the long and glorious series of mechanical triumphs which has made a large degree of leisure possible, not for a few thousand women, as was previously the case, but for millions and millions of them.

It was only about two feet square. But it accomplished a thing never before accomplished. It spun the first thread ever spun in the history of the world without the intervention of human fingers.

On that night woman lost her oldest and most significant title and function. The Spinster ceased to be.

The mistress and her maid, spinning together in the Hall, their fingers drawing the roving from the distaff and stretching it out as the142spindle twisted it, were finally on the point of separating forever.

We all see what Wyatt’s machine did to the maids. We all understand that when he started his mill at Birmingham and hired his working force often girls, he prophesied the factory “slum.”

We do not yet realize what he did to the mistresses, how he utterly changed their character and how he marvelously increased their number.

But look! His machine, with the countless machines which followed it, in the spinning industry and in all other industries, made it possible to organize masses of individuals into industrial regiments which required captains and majors and colonels and generals. It created the need of leadership, ofmultitudinousleadership. And with leadership came the rewards of leadership. And the wives and daughters of the leaders (a race of men previously, by comparison, nonexistent) arose in thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions to live in leisure and semi-leisure on the fruits of the new system.

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While the maids went to the “slums,” the mistresses went to the suburbs.

What did Wyatt get out of it? Imprisonment for debt and the buzz of antiquarians above his rotted corpse.

Wyatt and his equally humble successors in genius, Hargreaves and Crompton, artisans! Where in history shall we find men the world took more from, gave less to?

To Hargreaves, inventing the spinning-jenny, a mob and a flight from Lancashire, a wrecked machine and a sacked house! To Crompton, inventing the spinning-mule (which, in simulating, surpassed the delicate pulling motion of the spinster’s arm)—to Crompton, poverty so complete that the mule, patient bearer of innumerable fortunes to investors, was surrendered to them unpatented, while its maker retired to his “Hall-in-the-Wood” and his workman wages!

Little did Wyatt and Hargreaves and Crompton eat of the bread of idleness they built the oven for.

But Arkwright! There was the man who foreshadowed, in his own career, the new aristocracy144about to be evoked by the new machinery. He made spinning devices of his own. He used everybody else’s devices. He patented them all. He lied in the patents. He sued infringers of them. He overlooked his defeats in the courts. He bit and gouged and endured and invented and organized till, from being a barber and dealing in hair-dyes and bargaining for the curls of pretty girls at country fairs, he ended up Sir Richard Arkwright and—last perfect touch in a fighting career—was building a church when he died.

And his son was England’s richest commoner.

It was the dawn of the day of common richness.

The new aristocracy was as hospitably large as the old aristocracy had been sternly small. Before Wyatt, leisure had been the thinnest of exhalations along the very top of society. Since Wyatt, it has got diffused in greater and greater density through at least the upper third of it. And for all that magical extension of free time, wrested from the ceaseless toil with which God cursed Adam, we stand indebted (and so recently!)145to the machinerysetgoing by that spontaneous explosion of artisan genius in England only a hundred and fifty years ago,keptgoing (and faster and faster) by the labor of men, women, and children behind factory windows, the world over, to-day.

Marie’s view of the situation, however, is the usual one. We are billions of miles from really realizing that leisure is produced by somebody’s work, that just “Being a Good Woman” or “Being a Decent Fellow” is so far from being an adequate return for the toil of other people that it is just exactly no return at all. We are billions of miles from admitting that the virtuous parasite is just as much a parasite as the vicious parasite:—that the former differs from the latter in the use of the money but not at all in the matter of getting it in return for nothing.

Getting something for nothing is the fundamental immorality of the world. But we don’t believe it. There will be a revolution before we get it into our heads that trying to trade a sweet disposition or an intelligent appreciation of opera or a proficiency at amateur tennis for three meals a day is a fraud.

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Marie didn’t mean to commit a fraud. She just dropped a sentimental, non-negotiable plugged nickel into the slot-machine of life and drew out a motor-car and a country place, and was innocently pleased. Such a wonderful slot-machine! She never saw the laboring multitudes behind it, past and present multitudes, dead fingers, living fingers, big men’s fingers, little children’s fingers, pulling the strings, delivering the prizes, laying aside the plugged nickel in the treasury of a remote revenge.

TO CURE A HEADACHE—WORKING-GIRL THERAPY: TAKE A GOOD JOB AND STIR IT CONSTANTLY FROM BREAKFAST TO SUPPER.

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Perhaps the reasonwhy she didn’t catch on to the fact that, instead of being the world’s creditor, she was really inhabiting an almshouse was that she was so busy.

You see, she not only did things all the time but she had to find and invent them to do. Her life, even before she was married, was much more difficult than her brother’s, who simply got up in the morning and took the same old 7.42 to the same old office.

When he wanted clothes he went to the nearest decent tailor.

No such cinch for Marie. Her tailor lived in Sutherton, on the directly opposite side of the city from the suburb in which Marie lived. Just to get to that tailor’s cost Marie an hour and a half of effort. She had got up early, but by the time the tailor had stuck the world’s visible supply of pins into the lines of her new coat, most of the forenoon had been arduously occupied.

Of course many forenoons had to be thus occupied. Never forget it! The modish adaptation of woven fabrics to the female contour becomes increasingly complex and minute and148exacting and time-occupying in precise proportion as the amount of time increases for which occupation must be devised.

Besides, it gives employment to the tailors.

This is the really meritorious function of the leisure class. It gives employment. And every extension of its tastes and needs gives more employment. Marie and her friends greatly increased the number and prosperity of tailors and milliners and candy-dippers and perfume-manufacturers and manicurists and hairdressers and plumed-bird hunters and florists and cab-drivers and Irish lace-makers and Chinese silkworm tenders and violet-and-orris sachet-powder makers and matinée heroes and French nuns who embroider underwear and fur-traders and pearl-divers and other deserving persons, not forgetting the multitudes of Turks who must make nougat or perish.

In fact, Marie and her friends, in the course of a year, gave as much employment as a fair-sized earthquake. That is, in the course of a year, they destroyed, without return, a large amount of wealth and set many people to work replacing it. If we had a large enough leisure149class we should have no need of fires and railroad wrecks and the other valuable events which increase our prosperity by consuming it.

Marie belonged to the real Consumers’ League. And she consumed prettily and virtuously. It wasn’t bad air that suffocated her soul. It was no air.

TO CURE A HEADACHE—SHIRKING-GIRL THERAPY: TAKE A DOCTOR, A FAMILY, A NICE BRIGHT DAY, AND A BOX OF CHOCOLATES: USE THEM ALL UP.

She thought she wasbreathing, however, and breathing fast. Why, it was half past eleven before she got back downtown from her tailor, and she bought a wedding present till one, and she was just famished and ran to a tea room, but she had hardly touched a mouthful when she remembered there was a girl from out of town who had come in to spend a month doing nothing and had to be helped, but though she rushed to the ’phone she couldn’t get her friend before it was time to catch her suburban train home; in order to do which she jumped into the station ’bus, only to remember she had forgotten to buy a ribbon for her Siamese costume for the Benefit Ball; but it was too late now and she spent her time, going out on the train, trying to think of some way of getting along without it, and her head began to ache; but luckily she150met some of the girls on her way from the station to her high-school sorority alumnæ reunion and they began to tell her how to do it; but she had to hurry away because she had promised to go to the house of one of the girls and do stencil patterns, which started to be beautiful, but before she could get any of them really done she recollected that Chunk Brown had sent over a bunch of new songs and was coming to call to-night and she had to scoot home and practice “June time is moon time and tune time and spoon time,” as well as “The grass is blue o’er little Sue,” till there was just one hour left before dinner and she was perfectly crazy over the new “do” which one of the girls had showed her and she rushed upstairs and went at that “do” and by dinner time she had got it almost right, so that her father told her always to do her hair like that and brother wished he had it down at the factory to replace a broken dynamo brush, while as for Chunk, he was nicer than ever till he learned he had to take her to a rehearsal of the Siamese Group for the Benefit Ball: so that, what with having to coax him to go and what with changing into her costume,151she got to the rehearsal so tired she couldn’t stand up to go through the figures till she caught sight of the celebrated æsthete, the Swami Ram Chandra Gunga Din, who was there to hand out the right slants about oriental effects and who had persuaded Marie there was great consolation to be found in realizing that152life is a spiral and that therefore you can’t make progress straight up but must go round and round through rhythmic alternations of joy and sorrow, which caused Chunk to relapse again from his attentiveness but which pleased Marie greatly because she was always unhappy in between two periods of happiness and therefore felt she was getting along the spiral and into Culture pretty well, till it was eleven o’clock and she waked Chunk up out of a chair in the hall and made him take her home; and he said the Swami was avery cleverman and she said American men had no culture and didn’t understand women, and Chunk didn’t even say good night to her, and she went to sleep crying, and remembering she hadn’t after all learned from the girls how to get along without that ribbon in her costume and she must get up early and buy it, which made her utter one final little plaintive sniffle of vexation.

It was a nice child’s life, full of small things which looked big, uncorrected in its view of love, culture, charity, or anything else by any carrying of the burdens, enduring of the shocks, or thrilling to the triumphs, of a really adult153life. Her brother, when he went to work, was her junior. In five years he was much her senior. (You may verify this by observation among your own acquaintances.) Marie was not a minute older now than when she left school. Talking to her at twenty-six was exactly the same experience as talking to her at twenty-one. That was what the world, from John Wyatt to her father, had done for her.

SEE THE PROUD HUSBAND. HE DID IT ALL HIMSELF.

From such a lifethere are necessarily revulsions. The empty leisure of the Nice Girl is quite successfully total waste. But it becomes intolerable to that waster who, though not desiring154genuine occupation, desires genuine sensation.

Hence smart sets.

Every social group in which there is much leisure has its own smart set. There may be a million dollars a year to spend. There may be only a few thousands. But there is always a smart set.

How suddenly its smartness may follow its leisure, how accurately its plunge into luxury may duplicate the suddenness of modern luxury itself, you may observe with your own eyes almost anywhere.

You see a little crowd of women come into the Mandarin Tea Room of the St. DuBarry in Novellapolis in the fresh West. When they remove their automobile veils you see that they were once, and very recently, the nicest sort of members of the sewing circle and the W. C. T. U. of Lone Tree Crossing.

When the waiter comes along with their cocktails and they begin to sip them out of their tea cups, you wake up with a jerk to realize that it’s half past three in the afternoon and the evening has begun.

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How rapid it all is!

There’s Margaret Simpson. A few years ago you might have seen her pumping the water for Jim’s breakfast, cleaning the lamps, and picking bugs off the potato vines.

Jim came to town. He struck it poor. Then he struck it rich. He owns a bunch of moving-picture places. He manufactures a patented bottle-stopper. He’s a pavement contractor. His wife has just as much leisure as any duchess.

The duchess has her individual estate and resources, which make it possible for her to lead an almost complete social life within her own walls. But never mind! Margaret has the Downtown District, coöperatively owned, coöperatively maintained, magnificently equipped with bright boudoirs in the rest rooms of the department stores, with wonderful conservatories where one may enter and gaze and pay no more attention to the florist than to one’s own gardener, with sumptuous drawing-rooms, like the Purple Parlor of the St. DuBarry, with body-servants in the beauty shops, with coachmen on the taxicabs, with seclusion in the Ladies’156Department of the Novellapolis Athletic Club—an infinitely resourceful estate, which Margaret knows as intimately as the duchess knows hers.

This morning she hunted down a new reduction plant on the eighteenth floor of the Beauty Block and weighed in at 185 on the white enamel scales. After an hour of Thermo-Vibro-Magneto-Magenta-Edison-Company light therapy, she weighed out at 182-6.

At luncheon she ate only purée of tomatoes, creamed chicken and sweetbreads, Boston bread and butter, orange punch and Lady Baltimore cake, severely cutting out the potatoes.

After luncheon she spent an hour in a tiny room which had mirrors all around it and a maid (as trim and French-accented as any maid any duchess could have) and a couple of fitters and a head fitter. It ended up with: “Do you mean to tell me that after all the reducing and dieting I’ve been doing I can’t wear under a twenty-seven? It’s ridiculous. I tell you what. Measure me for a made-to-order. These stock sizes all run large. If it’s made to order I can wear a twenty-six as easy as anybody.”

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Then she met up with her friends at the St. DuBarry.

You watch the waiter bring another round of drinks and you perceive that the evening is well under way and that the peak of the twenty-four hours is being disputatiously approached.

It appears that Perinique’s is a swell place to dine, but that the cheese is bad. The cheese is good right here at the St. DuBarry, but they don’t know how to toast the biscuits. At the Grünewurst the waiters are poor. At Max’s the soup is always cold. The mural decorations at the Prince Eitel are so gloomy they give you a chill.

Despair settles down on the scene. There seems to be no likelihood that there will be any dinner at all anywhere. In the absence, however, of that kind of good cheer, another kind is spread on the table when the inquiry is flung down whether or not the way in which Jim looked at Dora last night has been generally observed.

You conclude that poor, dear, innocent Dora ought not to have been looked at in that way.158You were hasty. Nobody is innocent in the Mandarin Tea Room of the St. DuBarry, when not there. Dora, you soon learn, deserves to be looked at in any and all ways. It’s not for her that we’re worried. It’s for Jim.

At the name of Jim, Margaret begins to look uncomfortable and helpless. She sinks lower and lower into her chair; and says nothing; and keeps on saying nothing; and seems likely to drown in silence; but her friends start in to rescue her. You can’t help seeing some of the life-lines as they are thrown out.

“If I wereyou, Margaret, andmyhusband behaved tomeas Jim is behaving toyou,I’d——”

“When you married Jim, Margaret, you were the prettiest——”

“No wonder Dora’s husband divorced her.”

“It’s a wonder she wouldn’t confine herself to making trouble for her own husbands without——”

“The trouble with you, Margaret, is that you’re too good to Jim, letting him run around with Dora and not doing anything yourself. If you had any sense you’d make him so jealous159he’d walk on his hands and hold a loaf of sugar on his nose for you.”

“Say, Fannie, why don’t you tell your friend Ned to cut in here and pay a little attention to Marge?”

“Oh, Ned’s no good.”

“Well, then, I’ll tell my husband to——”

“Don’t you do it! I started my husband once on a thing like that and he went at it so strong—Choose a bachelor.”

“That’s right. Ned’s not married. Let him do it.”

“Somebody ought to.”

“Say, Fannie, call Ned on the ’phone.”

“All right. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Say, Marge, we’ll eat at the Royal Gorge and I’ll put you and Ned side by side.”

“AndI’llsit next to your husband and tell him how strong Ned is with the ladies. He’ll take a good look all right.”

“Now buck up, Marge, and encourage Ned a little. Don’t be a fool.”

“I tell you, Marge, you’ll do a lot more with Jim by cutting up a little bit than by all this dieting you’re trying to do.”

160

“Say, Marge, it’s a good thing you’ve got on your white broadcloth and your willow plumes.”

“You can get ’em at Delatour’s now for twenty-five dollars.”

“Hello, Fannie, did you get Ned?”

“I got him all right, but what do you think? He’s got another date for to-night, so he can’t come.”

“Oh, flam!”

“Well, well, here’s Dora now, as usual. I suppose she’ll try to butt in.”

But she doesn’t. She just hesitates beside the table long enough to say: “Got to sweep right along, girlies. Going to buzz out to the Inland Inn for dinner with Ned. Yep. What’s the matter? You know Ned. Our old friend Ned. The same. He’s waiting for me now. G’bye.”

Talk of nerve! You have to hand it to that Dora girl!

Exit Dora. Enter Jim and five or six other men, mostly husbands to the women already present.

Jim begins by asking if anybody has seen Dora. The ensemble tells him not only that but161everything else about Dora. Harry orders a round of drinks. So does Charlie. Somebody praises the drawn-butter sauce at the Suddington. This is met with the merits of the pineapple parfait at the La Fontaine. Jim orders a round of drinks. Jim is willing to eat his hat if Dora’s divorce wasn’t her husband’s fault. Must have been. Never saw the husband. But Dora’s character! Jim drinks off one of the cocktails standing in front of his right-hand neighbor Frank, and returns to Dora’s character. No straighter little girl ever came to this town. On hearing this from her husband, Margaret gets up and leaves the Tea Room and goes to the Purple Parlor and cries. Fannie takes her opportunity and begins to tell Jim how attentive Ned has been lately to Margaret. This is so helpful that Jim drinks off another of Frank’s cocktails and runs to the Purple Parlor to find Margaret. She’s still crying. He thinks she’s crying because Ned is away with Dora. He rebukes her. In King Arthur’s vein. Is he not her husband? Woman, tell him that. But dignity soon tapers off with him into the “Now I warn you to cut it out” of the tyrannical manikin162with a cinder in the eye of his self-conceit. Their friends hear them quarreling and follow them into the Purple Parlor. There’s a terrible row in the Purple Parlor. The Purple Parlor is full of persons explaining. Fannie explains. Charlie explains. Each person explains, individually, to each other person, individually. Each couple reaches a satisfactory explanation. But, somehow, when they start to explain that explanation to the next couple, it vanishes. Everybody runs about trying to find it. The waiter runs about trying to find the gen’l’man to pay for the undrunk drinks back in the Tea Room. Frank, being the only member of the party who hasn’t been drinking, can’t help seeing what the waiter means. He pays the bill. Then he exerts himself like a sheep-dog and runs the whole crowd down the corridor and out into a couple of taxicabs. The air reminds them of unsatisfied appetites. Conjugal problems are things of the past. As the taxicabs jump out from the curb to the street-center everybody’s head is out of window and everybody’s voice is saying “The Suddington,” “The Grünewurst,” “Max’s,” “The Royal Gorge,” “Perinique’s.”

163

The revulsion from empty leisure in the direction of full-every-night leisure is balanced to some extent by a revulsion toward activity of a useful sort. This latter revulsion has two phases: Economic Independence, which has been spoken of in former chapters; Social Service and Citizenship, which will be spoken of in the next chapter.

Which one of these two revulsions will be the stronger? If it is the one toward useful activity, we shall see a dam erected against the current which, in carrying women out of the struggle for existence, carries them out of the world’s mental life. If it is the one toward frivolity, we shall see simply an acceleration of that current and a quicker and larger departure from all those habits of toil and of service which produce power and character.

With marriage, of course, Marie had a certain opportunity to get back into life. She had before her at least fifteen years of real work. And it would have been work of the realest sort. Effort—to and beyond all other effort! The carrying of new life in fear, the delivery164of it in torture, the nourishing of it in relinquishment of all the world’s worldliness, the watching over it in sleeplessness, the healing of its sickness in heart-sickness, the bringing of it, with its body strong, its mind matured, up into the world of adults, up into the struggle for existence! What a work!

But what a preparation for it had Marie!

She flinched from it. The inertia of her mind carried her to the ultimate logic of her life. Along about the time of her marriage she began to cease to be the typical normal girl of her type.

She became a woman of the future—of her type.

From the facts of modern leisure the positive character reacts toward novel activity. It may be a reaction toward Civic Service. Or toward Self-Support. Or toward an enormous never-before-witnessed expenditure of intelligent care on the physical and mental education of children. The positive character, fighting modern facts, creates new ideals. The character which is neither positive nor negative runs along as a neutral mixture of the old ideals and of the modern165facts, of child-rearing made amateurish by idling and of idling made irritable by child-rearing. The negative character—like Marie’s—just yields to the modern facts and is swept along by them into final irresponsibility and inutility.

But Marie wasn’t negative enough—she wasn’temotionalenough in her negativeness—to plunge intodissipation. It wasn’t in her nature to do anyplungingof any kind. Good, safe, motionlessspongingwas her instinct. And she will die in the odor of tubbed and scrubbed respectability. And if you knew her you would like her very much. She is charming.

When she and Chunk were married, they went to live in an apartment appropriate to a rising young man, and Marie’s job was on all occasions to look as appropriate as the apartment.

No shallow cynicism, this! Just plain, bald truth without any wig on it. The only thing that you could put your finger on that Marie really did was so to wear clothes and so to give parties as to be the barometer of her husband’s prosperity. And in every city you can see lots166of such barometers giving themselves an artificially high reading in order to create that “atmosphere” of success which is a recognized commercial asset.

Chunk was hugely pleased with Marie. She looked good at the dinner table in the café of their apartment building. She knew how to order the right dishes when they entertained and dined down town. She made it possible for him to return deftly and engagingly the social attentions of older people. She completed the “front” of his life, and he not only supported her but, as Miss Salmon, of Vassar, flippantly and seriously says, he “sported” her as he might a diamond shirt stud.

No struggle in Marie’s life so far! Nohavingto swim in the cold water of daily enforced duty or else sink.No being accustomed to the disagreeable feel of that water.

She had missed work. That was nothing. She had missed beinghardenedto work. That was everything.

The first demand ever made on her for really disagreeable effort came when Chunk, in order to get a new factory going, had to move for a167while to Junction City. When Marie bitterly and furiously objected, Chunk was severely astonished. Why, he had to go! It was necessary. But there had been no necessity in Marie’s experience. They became quarrelsome about it. Then stubborn. Marie talked about her mother and her friends and how she loved them (which was true) and stayed.

For two years she inhabited Chunk’s flat in the city and lived on Chunk’s monthly check.

She and Chunk were married. Chunk was to support her. He was the man nearest to her. Her father had once supported her. Her job then had been Being Nice. Her father had supported her for that, even after she had grown up. Well, she still was nice. And she still was, and deserved to be, supported. Perfectly logical.

For two years, neither really daughter now nor really wife, not being obliged any longer even to make suggestions to her mother about what to have for dinner, not being obliged any longer even to think out the parties for Chunk’s business friends, she did nothing but become more and more firmly fixed in her inertia, in her incapacity for hardship, in her horror of pain.

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