“My father,” said I cheerfully, “he does nothing but read, talk, and think politics.”
“Politics! That isn’t on the higher side. Women don’t care anything about that.”
“Well, what do they care about?” I inquired.
“About music and literature—and those artistic things.”
“Oh, those things are all right,” said I. “But I don’t see that it takes any more brains or any better brains to paint a picture or sing a song or write a novel than it does to run a railroad—or to plan one. If you’d try to understand business, dear,” I urged, “you might find it as interesting and as intellectual as anything that doesn’t help us make a living. Anyhow, I’ve simply got to give my brains to my work. You go ahead and attend to the higher side for the family. I’ll stick to the job that butters the bread and keeps the rain off.”
She was patient with me, but I saw she didn’t approve. However, as I knew she’d approve still less if I failed to provide for her and the two young ones—there were two at that time—I let the matter drop and held to the common-sense course. I hadn’t the faintest notion of the seriousness of that little talk of ours. And it was well I hadn’t, for to have made her realize her folly I’d have had to start in and educate her—uneducate her and then reëducate her. I don’t blame the women. I feel sorry for them. When I hear them talk about the lack of sympathy between themselves and American men, about the low ideals and the sordid talk the men indulge in, how dull it is, how different from the inspiring, cultured talk a woman hears among the aristocrats abroad, said aristocrats being supported in helpless idleness throughout their useless lives, often by hard-earned American dollars—when I hear this pitiful balderdash from fair lips, I grow sad. The American woman fancies she is growing away from the American man. The truth is that while she is sitting still, playing with a lapful of the artificial flowers of fake culture, like a poor doodle-wit, the American man is growing away from her. She knows nothing of value; she can do nothing of value. She has nothing to offer the American man but her physical charms, for he has no time or taste for playing with artificial flowers when the world’s important work is to be done. So the poor creature grows more isolated, more neglected, less respected, and less sought, except in a physical way. And all the while she hugs to her bosom the delusion that she is the great soul high sorrowful. The world moves; many are the penalties for the nation or the race or the sex that does not move with it, or does not move quickly enough. I feel sorry for the American woman—unless she has a father who will leave her rich or a husband who will give her riches.
I feel some of my readers saying that I must have been most unfortunate in the women I have known. Perhaps. But may it not be that those commiserating readers have been rarely fortunate in their feminine acquaintances?—or in lack of insight?
Now you probably not only know why we went to Brooklyn, but also what we did after we got there. I have not forgotten my promise to gentle reader. I shall not linger many moments in Brooklyn. True, it is superior to Passaic, at least to the part of Passaic in which I constrained gentle reader to tarry a minute or two. But it is still far from the promised heights.
My wife owes a vast deal to Brooklyn. As she haughtily ignores the debt, would deny it if publicly charged, I shall pay it for her. Brooklyn was her finishing school. It made her what she is.
In the last year or so we spent in Passaic there had been, as I have hinted, a marked outward change in all three of us. The least, or rather the least abrupt, change had been in me. Associated in business with a more prosperous and better-dressed and better-educated class of men, I had gradually picked up the sort of knowledge a man needs to fit himself for the inevitably changing social conditions accompanying a steady advance in material prosperity. I was as quick to learn one kind of useful thing as another. And just as I learned how to fill larger and larger positions and how to make money out of the chances that come to a man situated where money is to be made, so I learned how to dress like a man of the better class, how to speak a less slangy and a less ungrammatical English, how to use my mind in thinking and in discussing a thousand subjects not directly related to my business.