“Let’s go to Brooklyn.”
“Why not to New York?” said I. “At least until I get thoroughly trained, I want to be close to the office.”
“But there’s Margot,” said she. “Margot must have a place to play in. And we couldn’t afford such a place in New York. I can’t let her run about the streets or go to public schools. She’d pick up all sorts of low, coarse associates and habits.”
“Then let’s go to some town opposite—across the Hudson. If we can’t live on Manhattan Island, and I think you’re right about Margot, why, let’s live where living is cheap. We ought to be saving some money.”
“I hate these Jersey towns,” said Edna petulantly. “I don’t think Margot would get the right sort of social influences in them.”
As soon as she said “social influences” I should have understood the whole business. The only person higher up on the social ladder with whom Edna had been able to scrape intimate acquaintance in Passaic was a dowdy, tawdry chatterbox of a woman—I forget her name—who talked incessantly of the fashionable people she knew in Brooklyn—how she had gone there a stranger, had joined St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, and had at once become a social favorite, invited to “the very best houses, my dear; such lovely homes,” and associated with “the most charming cultured people,” and so on and on—you know the rest of the humbug.
Now, one of the discoveries about my wife which I but half understood and made light of, had been that she was mad, literally mad, on the subject of social climbing. That means she was possessed of the disease imported into this country from England, where it has raged for upward of half a century—the disease of being bent upon associating by hook or by crook with people whose strongest desire seems to be not to associate with you. This plague does not spare the male population—by no means. But it rages in and ravages the female population almost to a woman. Our women take incidental interest or no interest in their homes, in their husbands, in their children. Their hearts are centered upon social position, and, of course, the money-squandering necessary to attaining or to keeping it. The women who are “in” spend all their time, whatever they may seem to be about, in spitting upon and kicking the faces of the women who are trying to get “in.” The women who are trying to get “in” spend their whole time in smiling and cringing and imploring and plotting and, when it seems expedient, threatening and compelling. Probe to the bottom—if you have acuteness enough, which you probably haven’t—probe to the bottom any of the present-day activities of the American woman, I care not what it may be, and you will discover the bacillus of social position biting merrily away at her. If she goes to church or to a lecture or a concert—if she goes calling or stays at home—if she joins a suffrage movement or a tenement reform propaganda, or refuses to join—if she dresses noisily or plainly—if she shuns society or seeks it, if she keeps house or leaves housekeeping to servants, roaches, and mice—if she cares for or neglects her children—if she pets her husband or displaces him with another—no matter what she does, it is at the behest of the poison flowing through brain and vein from the social-position bacillus. She thinks by doing whatever she does she will somehow make her position more brilliant or less insecure, or, having no position at all, will gain one.
And the men? They pay the bills. Sometimes reluctantly, again eagerly; sometimes ignorantly, again with full knowledge. The men—they pay the bills.
Now you know better far than I knew at the time why our happy little family went to Brooklyn, took the house in Bedford Avenue which we could ill afford if we were to save any money, and joined St. Mary’s.
A couple of years after we were married my wife stopped me when I was telling her what had happened at the office that day, as was my habit. “You ought to leave all those things outside when you come home,” said she.