“Say,” yawned one of the men, “do you think marriage is a failure?”
“Failure! failure!” answered the other. “The biggest kind of a success! Failure! Holy smoke! Why I’ve just married my third wife. Failure! It beats electric lights all hollow.”
“I don’ know,” answered the questioner, dyspeptically. “I don’ know. I go home every week or ten days. My wife isn’t glad to see me. I’m going home now. She won’t be glad. They think more of you when you’re not home so much.”
“Whee-u-u-u,” whistled number two.
With a holiday on his hands no man is more awkward. The secret of giving himself to enjoyment he does not know. His relaxation takes crudest form. Holiday enjoyment means in many cases sowing money in barbaric fashion, in every thinkable triviality that entails expense. That which he has bent every nerve toward getting, for which he has grown prematurely careworn, the possession of which vulgar philosophy counts the summa summarium of life, this he must scatter broadcast, not in the real things of art and literature and bettering the condition of the less fortunate, but in sordid pleasure and vacuous rushing hither and yon. It is his way of showing superiority to the cub who has not the money-making faculty, or who holds different ideas of the value of living. Upon such merrymaking he has been known to indulge in Homeric laughter over his own excess, and in tones heralds used in the days of Agamemnon. Physically he breathes deeper and is broader chested than many men; he has more voice, and he puts it out the top of the throat.
To watch the purple dog-tooth violet push up through dead leaves in March; to listen in his fragrant, sunlit spring to the song of the thrush or the delectable yearning of the mourning-dove; to know the quivering windflowers that freshen soil under oak and hickory—all this is to him as the yellow primrose to Peter Bell. There is no pleasure without an end—that end being money.
The blooded mare in his stable needs exercise and he likes not another to drive her lest she lose response to his voice and hand. But it is really a bore to drive; what interest is there in sitting in a wagon and going round and round? He must be doing something. He forgets the retaliation nature takes upon grooves in human life and that discountenancing of innocent pleasures is the first step toward dementia paralytica and the end of interest in his fair and buoyant world. He will probably die suddenly in middle age, for he is too extreme in expenditure of himself, and too small an eater of the honey of life. Honey-eaters have terrene permanence.
This man and woman are not disproportionate neighbors. What will be their record to the reading of Prince Posterity?
The lands that border the Big Muddy have more of the old American spirit than the extreme East. The proportions of the old American blood are there greater than upon the sea-coast, where Europeans of a tradition far different from the ideals and enthusiasms of our early comers have dropped and settled, and in such numbers that they can and do knit their old mental and social habits into a garment which is impervious to true American influences.