CHAPTER XXIX
MRS. NEWLYRICH AND HER SOCIAL DUTIES
WE have ridiculed our newly-rich woman’s fads, pretensions and failures so sharply and for so long that we find it hard to do justice to the solid virtues she often possesses. The average specimen is fair game, and we—one and all, from the gentlest to the most sarcastic—unite in “setting her down.”
Except perhaps the mother-in-law, no other woman supplies fun-makers with such abundant—and cheap—material. She might retaliate on her persecutors more frequently than she does by attributing much of the ridicule, fine and coarse, heaped on her, to envy, far meaner than the meanest of her pretensions.
Thus much for the average specimen at her worst. The exceptions to the ignoble parvenu are numerous enough to form a class by themselves. It is not a disgrace in this country of dizzying down-sittings and bewildering uprisings, for miner, mechanic, merchant or manufacturer to make money fast. It is to his credit when he insists that the girl who was poorer than himself when they were married, and who has kept him at his best physical and mental estate ever since by wise management of their modest household—making every dollar do the work of a dollar-and-a-quarter while feeding and clothing her family—should get the full benefit of his changed fortunes. In house, furniture, clothing, company, and what he names vaguely “a good time generally,” he means that she shall ruffle it with the bravest of her associates. He means also that these associates shall be in accord with his means. And the intention need not be in vain. A woman who is by instinct a lady, and who is at all clever in observing the little things she lacks and acquiring them, will find herself “received” by as many delightful people as she has time for. And inwardly she may take courage from a witty woman’s remark, “I’d as soon be the newly-rich as the always-poor.”
MR. NEWLYRICH
However, the odds are all against the chances that our worthy money-maker himself will conform his personal behavior to the new conditions. Husbands of his type leave “all that sort of thing” to wives and daughters, and make the social advancement of these women harder thereby. Not the least formidable obstacle in their upward journey is the stubborn fact that “your father is quite impossible.”
SOCIAL POLISH