I laughed. “Not a bad thing, money,” said I.
“It would never have got me Mrs. Armitage’s friendship,” said she loftily.
“You think so?” said I amiably. “All right, if it pleases you. But—take my advice, my dear—enjoy yourself to the limit with highfaluting talk about the worthlessness of money and that sort of rot. But don’t for a minute lose your point of view and convince yourself.”
“Thank God I’ve got a vein of refinement, of idealism in my nature,” said Edna. “I wouldn’t have as sordid an opinion of human nature as you have for anything in the world.”
“You can afford not to have it, my dear,” said I. “So long as I know the truth, and so make the necessary money to keep us going, you are free to indulge your lovely delusions. Have your beautiful, unmercenary friendship with Mrs. Armitage and the other ladies. I’ll continue to make it financially worth their husbands’ while to encourage the friendships.”
“I thought so!” cried she. “You believe Mrs. Armitage has taken me up for business reasons.”
“If you had been some poor woman—” I began mildly.
“Don’t be absurd!” cried my wife. “How could there be an equal and true friendship between Mrs. Armitage and a woman with none of the surroundings of a lady, and with no means of gratifying the tastes of a lady? But that doesn’t mean that Mrs. Armitage is a low, sordid woman. She has a beautiful nature. Money is merely the background of high society. It simply gives ladies and gentlemen the opportunity to set the standards of dress and manners and taste. And of course they’re careful whom they associate with. Who wants to be annoyed by adventurers and climbers and all sorts of dreadful mercenary, self-seeking people?”
“Who, indeed?” said I.
It gently appealed to my sense of the ridiculous, to see my wife thus changed in a twinkling into a defender and exponent of fashionable society. It was so deliciously feminine, as fantastically humorless, her sincere belief in the poppycock she was reeling off—the twaddle with which Mrs. Armitage had doubtless stuffed her. The sordidness, the vulgarity, the meanness, the petty cruelty, the snobbishness of fashionable people—all forgotten in a moment, hastily covered deep with the gilt and the tinsel of hypocritical virtues. What an amusing ass the human animal is! How stupidly unconscious of its own motives! How eagerly it attributes to itself all kinds of high motives for the ordinary, or scrubby, or downright mean actions—and attributes the same motives to its fellow asses, to make its own pretenses the more plausible! An amusing ass—but it would be more amusing if it were not so monotonously solemn, but laughed at itself occasionally.