In theory Margot was still classed as a child, and would be so classed for two years longer. In fact she was, and had been for two years and more, a full-fledged young lady. That is the way American children of the rank for which my wife was training Margot are being brought up nowadays. She had her own apartment, dressing room and bath, sitting room, reception room—as many rooms as my wife and I had altogether when we began married life, and about four times the room. As for luxury, a comparison would be ridiculous. Also Margot had her own staff of servants—companion, maid, maid’s assistant—and her own automobile with chauffeur, used by no one else. It would be hard to find more helpless creatures than these young aspirants to aristocracy. And they prided themselves upon their ignorance of the realities, and their mothers, often with hypocritical pretense of distress, boasted it. At that time I thought it amusing. The serious side of it was entirely out of my range. We American men of the comfortable and luxurious classes are addicted to the habit of regarding our wives and children as toys, as mere sources of amusement not to be taken seriously. It isn’t strange that the children should not mind this, but what a commentary upon the real mentality of the women that they tolerate and encourage it! Our women are always, with a fine show of earnestness, demanding that they be taken seriously. But woe unto the man who believes them in earnest and tries to treat them as his equals instead of as dainty toys, odalisques. How he will be denounced, hated, and, if proper alimony can be got, divorced!
Margot’s parties differed in no respect from grown-up parties, except that there were restrictions in the matter of hours and also as to the serving of drinks. For, I believe my wife did not follow the extreme of fashionable custom, but forbade wines and punch at these parties. In this matter, as in the matter of using slang and in many others, she held that only people of long-established social position, people with what is called tradition, could safely make excursions beyond the bounds of conventionality; that it was safest, wisest for people like herself to stay well within the bounds, to be prim even, and so to avoid any possible criticism as vulgar. A very shrewd woman was Edna. If her intelligence had been equal to her shrewdness and energy, and if she had possessed a gleam of the sense of humor! However——
In no essential respect did Margot’s routine of life differ from that of her mother—and her mother’s routine of inane and worthless time-killing was modeled exactly upon that of all the fashionable women and apers of fashionable women. Edna did a vast amount of studying, with and without teachers. It was all shallow and showy. Margot’s studies were also beneath contempt. I amused myself from time to time by inquiring—with pretense of gravity—into what they were teaching her at the Ryper school for the turning out of fashionable womanhood. Such a mess of trash! She was learning much about social usages, from how to sit in a carriage—a rare art that, I assure you, gentle reader—to how to receive guests at a large dinner. She was studying some of the vulgarities—science, history, literature, and the like—but in no vulgar way. She would get only the thinnest smatter of talkable stuff about them—nothing “unsettling,” nothing that might possibly rouse the mind to think or distract the attention from the “high” things of life. She was dabbling in music, in drawing, in several similar costly fripperies. And the sum total of expense!—well, no wonder Miss Ryper was fast becoming as rich as some of the asteroids in the plutocracy she adored.
I regarded Margot’s education as a species of joke. It never occurred to me that our pretty baby had the right to be educated to become a wife and a mother. And why should it have occurred to me? Where is that being done? Who is thinking of it? In all the oceans of twaddle about the elevation of woman where is there a drop of good sense about real education? You say I was criminally negligent as to my daughter’s education. But how about your own? The truth is, we all still look upon education as a frill, an ornament. We never think of it, whether for our sons or for our daughters, as nothing more or less than teaching a human being how to live. It is high time to end this idiotic ignorant exaltation of tomfoolery into culture!
Poor Margot! How the little girls in plain clothes—and machine-made underwear—must have envied her as she swept along in her limousine, dressed with that enormously costly simplicity which only the rich can afford. No wonder many of the other girls at the Ryper school hated her. For, her mother was in one respect unlike most of the fashionable mothers who are too busy doing things not worth doing to attend to their children. Her mother gave her loving care, spent many hours—of anxious thought, no doubt—in planning to make her the most luxurious, the most helpless, the most envied girl in the school. We hear unendingly about the good that love does in the world. Not too much—no, indeed! But at the same time might it not be well if we also heard about the harm love can do—and does? How many sons and daughters have been ruined by loving parents! How many husbands have been wrecked by the flatteries and the assiduities of loving wives! How many wives have been lured to decay and destruction by the over-indulgent love of their husbands! What we need in this world is not more sentiment, but more intelligence. Sentiment is a force that rushes far and crazily in both directions, gentle reader, unless it has well-balanced intelligence to guide it.
Margot, smiling in the doorway of the breakfast room, put me at once into a less somber humor. She was tall and slim—an inch taller than her mother and with the same supple, well-proportioned figure. She had her mother’s small, tip-tilted face and luminous eyes, but they were of an intense dark gray that gave her an expression of poetic thoughtfulness and mystery. Whiter or more perfectly formed teeth I have never seen. In former days children’s teeth were neglected. But my wife, with her peculiar reach for all matters having to do with appearances, had learned the modern methods of caring for the body when Margot was still in the period when the body is almost as formable as sculptor’s clay. Thus Margot’s teeth had been looked after and made perfect and kept so. Her hair hung loose upon her shoulders like a wonderful changeable veil of golden brown. Often at first glance you are dazzled by these carefully fed and carefully groomed children of the rich, only to note at the second glance that the best showing has been made of precious little in the way of natural charm. But this was not true of Margot. The longer you looked, and the more attentively, the finer she seemed to be—like a rare perfect specimen from a connoisseur’s greenhouses. There’s no doubt about it, Edna did know the physical side of life. She would have got notable results even had we been poor. As it was, with all the money she cared to spend, she performed what looked like miracles.
“Come and kiss me, Margot,” said I.
She obeyed, with a charming air of restrained eagerness that is regarded as ladylike. “My car is waiting,” said she. “I’m late.”
“Is that Therese”—her maid—“out in the hall waiting to go with you?”
“Yes. Miss Parnell”—her companion—“has a headache, poor creature!”