Martha suddenly and irresistibly chuckled.
'I have a story for you, Honoria,' she said. 'A lot of ranchers over there,' she vaguely gestured toward the southwest across the hills, 'have grown suddenly rich, raising sugar beets, and have bought motor-cars and other paraphernalia proper to their improved condition. One of them was heard to say, "I b'lieve these college graduates that teach school 'round here really think they're as good as us rich folks." That is the real attitude of your "undistinguished rich" toward the gifts of culture and the finer qualities!'
'Honoria,' said Grace, 'haven't the sages always said, "Give me neither poverty nor riches"? Why should your propaganda succeed where Job and Socrates have failed? Job lived a long while ago! If the race were going to be converted to his view, the process ought to be more advanced. You will need very strong arguments for your doctrine of limitations.'
'Arguments are to be had for the picking up,' returned Honoria. 'What kind will you have? Reasonable limitation on the material side always brings some amazing flowering of mind or spirit like the blossoming of a root-bound plant. If you want a racial argument, consider the Irish—the poorest people in Europe and therefore the richest in spirit. Poverty forced them to concentrate their attention upon their neighbors; there resulted an astonishing increase in sympathy, wit, and general humanness.—If you want an argument from Art, consider the Middle Ages. Peering out of a narrow world, hemmed in by ignorance and squalor, the mediæval artist caught sight of beauty and immediately loved it with such fervent, personal passion that everything he made in its image was vital and wonderful. As his world broadened in the Renaissance, much of his art grew florid and meaningless, lacking that marvelous, intimate quality of the earlier, restricted day.—If you want an argument from literary material, there's the Picciola of Saintine. You can make an imperishable literary masterpiece out of a convict's love for a tiny plant struggling up between two stones in a prison-yard, but you cannot make men listen to tales of great possessions. The interest in Monte Cristo centres upon the process of acquirement, and it is the same in any successful money-romance. Midas is only fit to point a moral, never to adorn a tale.—If you want an argument from philology, consider that the diminutives in every language show the lesser thing to be the dearer thing, always. Remember Marie Antoinette and the Little Trianon! Consider the increasing specialization in science—science which always falls on its feet! I know a thousand arguments! The thing I am in need of is converts!'
'If you could get them,' said Martha, 'there might really be a Woman's Reformation, only it would begin at home instead of at the polls.'
'What other permanent thing is there in life but the hearthstone? Nations rise and fall, laws and institutions come and go—but that remains, the one fixed point in human society. I take it, therefore, it is the one point from which the lever can successfully be brought to bear on human society. If anything is to be moved or altered, the force must be applied there.'
'But human society has changed, Honoria,' urged Grace. 'Look at all our new powers and possessions! Steam and electricity have remade the world, and we are not yet adjusted to the alteration. No generation ever lived under our conditions; thus we have no traditions for handling our new environment. No heritage of ancestral wisdom tells us what of the hundreds of new opportunities to accept, what to reject. Save in so far as we are thinking beings—and that is not very far—we are as much at the mercy of our desires as babies in a toy-shop, grabbing now this and now that, heaping up a lapful of futilities and calling it a life.'
'Yes. But why should we make steam and electricity serve our greed only? Why use them chiefly to darken the world and make life a horror? Dare you affirm that we women and our demands are not at the very centre of the tragic tangle of modern living? Isn't all this horrible speeding-up of business largely an outgrowth of our exactions? What do men do business for, anyhow, except to get us what we want! Homes are to other material possessions what souls are to the bodies—the centre from which the life moves outward. If there is no greed in the home, is there not bound to be less greed in the offices?'
'I'm not so sure, Honoria,' Grace returned. 'No amount of intensiveness in the home would eliminate man's love of power for its own sake.'
'Perhaps. Yet isn't the lust for power a secondary development? We begin by being greedy because we want things; we keep on after we have more things than we know what to do with, because greed has created the power-lust. It is the aftermath from that ugly root. If the pressure the home puts on the man for money were suddenly slackened all along the line, above the point of poverty, might not the matter of unseemly accumulations correct itself? If we women of the more favored classes avowedly undertook to give quality to our belongings, instead of demanding belongings which we hope will confer quality upon us, there would surely be both a lessening in the stress of life and an improvement in its texture. I can think of nothing else but the Golden Rule that would help to solve so many menacing problems, such as the high cost of living, the commercialization of life, and the divorce problem. Oh, it would be very far-reaching, that attitude, if we could only achieve it!'