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 might work at avoiding pain.

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, 136 with 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 to 137 them. Marie belonged to the Leisure Class. Socially, she was therefore distinctly superior to her father and her husband.

President Thomas of Bryn Mawr 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 commercial 138 rivalry, 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 of 139 conduct 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—a 140 perfect 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, have 141 gone 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 the 142 spindle 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 of ten 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, of multitudinous leadership. 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.

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 aristocracy 144 about 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!) 145 to the machinery set going by that spontaneous explosion of artisan genius in England only a hundred and fifty years ago, kept going (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.

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.

Perhaps the reason why 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 and 148 exacting 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 leisure 149 class 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.

She thought she was breathing, 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 she 150 met 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, 151 she 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 that 152 life 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 a very clever man 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 adult 153 life. 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.

From such a life there 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 desiring 154 genuine 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.

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’ 156 Department 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.”

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. 158 You 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 were you, Margaret, and my husband behaved to me as Jim is behaving to you, 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 jealous 159 he’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.”

“And I’ll sit 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.”

“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 but 161 everything 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 manikin 162 with 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.”

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 delivery 164 of 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 modern 165 facts, 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’t emotional enough in her negativeness—to plunge into dissipation. It wasn’t in her nature to do any plunging of any kind. Good, safe, motionless sponging was 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 lots 166 of 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! No having to 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 being hardened to 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 a 167 while 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.

When Chunk came back from Junction City and was really convinced that she didn’t want children he was not merely astonished. He thought the world had capsized.

In a way he was right. The world is turning round and over and back to that one previous historical era when the aversion to childbearing was widespread.

Once, just once, before our time, there was a modern world. Once, just once, though not on the scale we know it, there was, before us, a diffusion of leisure.

The causes were similar.

The Romans conquered the world by military force, just as we have conquered it by mechanical invention. They lived on the plunder of despoiled peoples, just as we live on the products of exploited continents. They had slaves in multitudes, just as we have machines in masses. Because of the slaves, there were hundreds of thousands of their women, in the times of the Empire, who had only denatured housekeeping to do, just as to-day there are millions of our women who, because of machines, have only that kind of housekeeping to do. Along with leisure 169 and semi-leisure, they acquired its consequences, just as we have acquired them. And the sermons of Augustus CÆsar, first hero of their completed modernity, against childlessness are perfect precedents for those of Theodore Roosevelt, first hero of ours.

Augustus, however, addressed himself mainly to the men, who entered into marriage late, or did not enter into it at all, for reasons identical with ours—the increased competitiveness of the modern life and the decreased usefulness of the modern wife. It was the satirists who addressed themselves particularly to the women. And their tirades against idleness, frivolity, luxury, dissipation, divorce, and aversion to childbearing leave nothing to be desired, in comparison with modern efforts, for effectiveness in rhetoric—or for ineffectiveness in result.

Now it could not have been the woman who desires economic independence through self-support who was responsible for the ultimate aversion to child-bearing in the Roman world—for she did not exist. It could not have been the woman who desires full citizenship—for she did not exist. What economic power and 170 what political power the Roman Empire woman desired and achieved was parasitic—the economic power which comes from the inheritance of estates, the political power which comes from the exercise of sexual charm.

The one essential difference between the women of that ancient modern world and the women of this contemporary modern world is in the emergence, along with really democratic ideals, of the agitation for equal economic and political opportunity.

The other kind of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her real work, going then into marriage with none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to share his struggle but his prosperity—that sort of New Woman they had, just as we have her, in smaller number, it is true, but in identical character.

They tell us it was “luxury” that ruined the Romans. But was luxury the start? Wasn’t it only the means to the finish?

Eating a grouse destroys, in itself, no more moral fiber than eating a ham sandwich. Bismarck, whether he slept on eider down or on straw, arose Bismarck.

The person who has a job and who does it is very considerably immunized against the consequences of luxury. First, because he is giving a return for it. Second, because he hasn’t much time for it.

On the other hand, we see the hobo who won’t work ruining himself on the luxury of stable floors and of free-lunch counters, just as thoroughly as any nobleman who won’t work can ever ruin himself on the luxury of castles and of game preserves.

It is clearly the habitual enjoyment of either grouse or ham sandwiches, of either eider down or straw, without service rendered and without fatigue endured, that ultimately desiccates the moral character and drains it of all capacity for effort.

Marie was enervated not by her luxury but by 172 her failure to pay for her luxury. She wouldn’t have had to pay much. Her luxury was petty. But she paid nothing. And her failure to pay was just as big as if her luxury had been bigger. Getting three thousand a year in return for nothing leaves you morally just as bankrupt as if you had got three million.

Marie came to her abdication of life’s greatest effort not by wearing too many clothes or by eating too many foods but by becoming accustomed to getting clothes and foods and all other things without the smallest effort.

She had given her early, plastic, formative years to acquiring the habit of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an effort came, the effort just wasn’t in her.

Her complete withdrawal from the struggle for existence had at last, in her negative, non-resistive mind, atrophied all the instincts of that struggle, including finally the instinct for reproduction.

The instinct for reproduction is intricately involved in the struggle for existence. The individual struggles for perpetuation, for perpetuation in person, for perpetuation in posterity. 173 Work, the perpetuation of one’s own life in strain and pain; work, the clinging to existence in spite of its blows; work, the inuring of the individual to the penalties of existence, is linked psychologically to the power and desire for continued racial life. The individual, the class, which struggles no more will in the end reproduce itself no more. In not having had to conquer life, it has lost its will to live.

The detailed daily reasons for this social law stand clear in Marie’s life. It is a strong law. Its triumph in Marie could have been thwarted only by the presence in her of a certain other social law. Authority!

The woman who is coerced by Authority, the woman who is operated by ideals introduced into her from without, will bear children even when she does not feel the active wish to bear them. She will bear them just because the authoritative expectation is that she shall bear them.

But Marie was free!

She was free from the requirement of an heir for the family estate. The modern form of property, requiring no male warrior for its defense 174 in the next generation, had done that for her.

She was free from the dictates of historic Christianity about conjugal duty and unrestricted reproduction. Modern Protestantism had done that for her.

She was free from the old uncomplaining compliance with a husband’s will. Modern individualism had done that for her.

She was free! Uncoerced by family authority, uncoerced by ecclesiastical authority, uncoerced by marital authority, she was almost limitlessly free!

There being no external force compelling her to bear children, she had to follow internal instinct.

That instinct, if it had existed in her, would have been a sufficient guide. It would have been a commanding guide. It would have been the best possible guide. Rising in her from the original eternal life-power it would have driven her to child-bearing more surely than she could have been driven to it by any external agency whatsoever.

But the instinct toward child-bearing could 175 not now be revived in Marie. With the cessation from struggle and from effort and from fatigue and from discipline and from the sorrow of pain that brings the joy of accomplishment, with that cessation the instinct toward child-bearing had reached cessation, too. With the petrifaction of its soil it had withered away.

Nobody had ever tried to bring Marie back to the soil of struggle. Nobody,—not her father, not her mother, not her husband, not one of her friends, not one of her teachers had ever taught her to return to life by returning to labor.

The greatest wrong possible to a woman had been wrought upon her.

She had been sedulously trained out of the life of the race into race-death.

Yet when it got talked around among her friends that she didn’t want children, people blamed her and said it was very surprising, in view of all that had been done for her.

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