“I presume that is so,” you acceded; “but could he not be content with a little less success in money-making, and strive to acquire a few more amenities?”
“Maizie wants us all to be painters and poets and musicians,” asserted Mr. Blodgett.
“Not at all,” you denied.
“Oh, Maizie!” cried Agnes. “You know you said the other day that you hoped I wouldn’t marry a business man.”
“I said ‘only a business man,’ Agnes,” you replied, without a trace of the embarrassment so many women would have shown. “Because men cannot all be clergymen is no reason for their knowing nothing of religion. There would be no painters, poets, or musicians if there were no dilettanti.”
“Yet I think,” argued Mr. Whitely, still as if he were trying to convince you of something, “that the successful business man has as much brain as most writers or artists.”
“I have no doubt that is true,” you assented. “So, too, a day laborer may have a good mind. But of what avail is a brain if it has never been trained, or has been trained to know only one thing?”
“But authors and painters are only specialists,” urged Mr. Whitely.
“They are specialists of a very different type,” you responded, “from the man whose daily thoughts are engrossed with the prices of pig-iron or cotton sheetings. I think one reason why American girls frequently marry Europeans is that the foreign man is so apt to be more broadly cultivated.”
“That’s what I mean by saying that books unfit women to marry wisely,” interjected Mrs. Blodgett. “They marry foreigners because they are more cultivated, without a thought of character.”