“Retire? Nonsense! Work,—that’s all a man’s good for. Got to stay in harness. Soon as he gets out of it he goes to pieces.”
“H’m,” said Stacey banteringly, “that’s the theory, of course. But just look around you. Here you come down to a bright jolly office entirely cut off from the home, and open nice crisp new letters, and call in—presently, when I stop bothering you—a fresh clean stenographer, and you watch the blue smoke of a good cigar curl up across the sunlight—no, sir, you can’t fool me with any talk about duty and the rest. Poetry! Sheer poetry! Men’s ingenuous little romance!”
Mr. Carroll leaned back in his chair and laughed.
“American business men,—why they’re our real leisure class!” Stacey concluded.
But at this his father protested. “I worked ten hours a day and sometimes twelve—hard—from the time I was eighteen till past forty,” he observed soberly.
“I know you did, sir,” Stacey assented respectfully. “I’m not talking about that epoch but about our own. The young business men I know—and I don’t mean the clerks, people working on a salary, but the men who will be rich one day from business—how about them? They get down to their offices anywhere from nine-thirty to ten, and they waste a good half-hour before they begin to work, and they play a lot even when they think they’re working; then they take an hour and a half off at the club for lunch; at four or thereabouts, weather permitting, they motor out to the country-club and play nine holes of golf; then they go back to a nice, different, clean house, with all the housekeeping tended to by their pretty wives. Oh, it’s a hard life!”
“You’re right,” the older man growled. “It’s a damned lazy life, and I don’t know what the country’s coming to if it keeps on.”
“Now really,” Stacey suggested, “can you blame a laboring man if he kicks?”
But at this Mr. Carroll’s mouth shut in a tight line. “I’m against loafing anywhere in any class,” he said sternly. “The laborer’s got his job and he loafs on it; the young business man has his and he loafs. I disapprove of both.”
“Yes,” Stacey returned mildly, “but the results are so disproportionate. The young business idler has a far more luxurious time than the most conscientious laborer could have.”