She sighed “Good night!” and wished that she were not so cantankerous. The closing of the door shook her whole frame, and she made a step forward to call him back, but sank into a chair instead, worn out with the general unsatisfactoriness of life, the complicated mathematical problem that never comes out even. Marriage is a circle that cannot be quite squared.
She sat droopily in her chair for a long while, pondering mankind and womankind and their mutual dependence and incompatibility. It would be nice to be married if one could stay single at the same time. But it was hopelessly impossible to eat your cake and have it, too.
Abbie, watching from her window and not knowing that Davidge had gone, imagined all sorts of things and wished that her wild sister would marry and settle down. And yet she wished that she herself had stayed single, for the children were a torment, and of her husband she could only say that she did not know whether he bothered her the more when he was away or when he was at home.
When Davidge left Mamise he looked back at the lonely 234 cottage she stubbornly and miserably occupied and longed to hale her from it into a palace. As he walked home his heart warmed to all the little cottages, most of them dark and cheerless, and he longed to change all these to palaces, too. He felt sorry for the poor, tired people that lived so humbly there and slept now but to rise in the morning to begin moiling again.
Sometimes from his office window he surveyed the long lines at the pay-windows and felt proud that he could pour so much treasure into the hands of the poor. If he had not schemed and borrowed and organized they would not have had their wages at all.
But now he wished that there might be no poor and no wages, but everybody palaced and living on money from home. That seemed to be the idea, too, of his more discontented working-men, but he could not imagine how everybody could have a palace and everybody live at ease. Who was to build the palaces? Who was to cut the marble from the mountains and haul it, and who to dig the foundations and blast the steel and fasten the girders together? It was easy for the dreamers and the literary loafers and the irresponsible cartoonists to denounce the capitalists and draw pictures of them as obese swine wallowing in bags of gold while emaciated children put out their lean hands in vain. But cartoons were not construction, and the men who would revolutionize the world could not, as a rule, keep their own books straight.
Material riches were everywhere, provided one had the mental riches to go out and get them. Davidge had been as poor as the poorest man at his works, but he had sold muscle for money and brains for money. He had dreamed and schemed and drawn up tremendous plans while they took their pay and went home to their evenings of repose in the bosoms of their families or the barrooms of idleness.
Still there was no convincing them of the realization that they could not get capital by slandering capitalists, or ease by ease, but only by sweat. And so everybody was saying that as soon as this great war was over a greater war was coming upon the world. He wondered what could be done to stay that universal fury from destroying utterly all that the German horror might spare.
Thinking of such things, he forgot, for the nonce, the pangs of love.