"Ignorance would cover it all," he answered, "but to be specific, intemperance, sensuality, avarice, and poverty. I don't mean drunkenness only, when I say intemperance. I have known a few prohibitionists in my time who were as intemperate in their eating as any one could be in the matter of drink. I think intemperance in its widest sense was the great curse of our time anyway; drink and tobacco and tea and coffee; and as to our eating, there was too much, of almost everything on earth that was not food, but which could be over-salted and over-peppered, and treated with tabasco sauce. We over-stimulated every activity of the body, and spent our lives doing all kinds of things in which there was no sense. Think of reading one or two morning and evening papers every day. To be sure we said there was nothing in them, but we used up our eyesight over them, and let a stream of silliness and scandal dribble through our minds. As to the things we wore—"
Robin laughed. "I know," she said. "The sewing-machine didn't save work; it only made ruffles. A dressmaker once said to me, 'It's a good thing for me that these women haven't sense enough to spend their time and money on themselves, in making their bodies free and strong and beautiful. But no; they would rather have a stylish dress than a graceful body. They don't care to be beautiful themselves; all they want is a handsome gown to cover their ugliness.' Isn't it strange that we never seemed able to realize that the Greek fashions were immortal because they were beautiful?"
"Still, I don't think the dress of the Greek women would be very convenient for housework," ventured Adam.
Robin shook her head. "You only say that because some woman has said it to you. The Diana of the Stag wore the first rainy-day gown. The Greek dress was capable of ever so many modifications. If I were making a handbook of proverbs for women, I should say, 'A good complexion is rather to be chosen than many fine dresses, and glossy and abundant hair turneth away wrath.' I believe in the simplification of life. I understand just how Thoreau felt when he threw out that specimen because it had to be dusted daily. There are very few things beautiful enough to pay for that amount of trouble. But perhaps that is because I don't care for specimens, and I loathe dusting."
"You ought to have been a Jap," said Adam. "There was one in college, in my class, and one day when I was fretting over something I could not afford he said, in that immensely polite way of theirs, 'You I cannot understand. With all American people it so is, even as by Ruskin said was it; whatever you have, of it you more would get, and where you are, you would go from. You happy are only when something you get, and never that you yourself are.' But I think the Celestial was wrong there. When a man is self-conscious of illy-made garments, a mean domicile, a poor kind of half education, he is uncomfortable; he hasn't accomplished his evolution from the conscious, the self-conscious, to the unconscious. It was this very discomfort and inequality that used so to enrage me, for it need not have been."
"I wish," said Robin, "we knew how to make paper; of all the fascinating things in Bellamy's 'Equality,' there was nothing I liked so well as the idea of paper garments, to be burned when one got through with them. Think of never having any washing and ironing, and always having new clothes."
"I wonder whether we could invent some of those things over again," said Adam, reflectively.
"I couldn't spare you any of my precious rags, if you could," said Robin.
"Most of the paper was made out of wood, anyhow," answered Adam, "and the ash that grows here in any quantity was considered particularly fine for that purpose."
"'God made man upright, but he hath sought out many inventions,'" quoted Robin, "and now we are going to seek them over again. I can't imagine how anyone could ever make a lineotype, but the type and the hand-press are easy enough, and if you can make paper, we may yet live to read our 'published works.' You probably do not know that I used to have a Wegg-like facility for dropping into poetry."