It was a social ceremony of large proportions, with almost everybody among those present, from the doctor down through Mother and Auntie to Little Sister. The decorations, which were very elaborate, comprised, besides the usual tasteful arrangement of thermometers, eau-de-Karlsbad, smelling-salts bottles, cracked ice, and chocolate creams, a perfect shower of tourmaline roses, the odor of which, alone among all the vegetable odors in the world, had been round after long experimentation to be soothing to Marie on such occasions. It was not thought that Marie could vanquish a headache except after a plucky fight of at least one day's duration.
Actresses go on and do their turns day after day and night after night with hardly a miss. Marie's troubles were no more numerous than theirs. But they were much larger. Troubles are like gases. They expand to fill any void into which they are introduced. Marie's spread themselves through a vacuum as large as her life.
The making of that vacuum and the inserting of Marie into it cost her father and her husband prodigious toil and was a great pleasure to them. Marie belonged to the Leisure Class. Socially, she was therefore distinctly superior to her father and her husband.
President Thomas of Bryn Mawr had Marie in mind when she said:
"By the leisured class we mean in America the class whose men work harder than any other men in the excitement of professional and commercial rivalry, but whose women constitute the only leisured class we have and the most leisured class in the world."
Marie's father wasn't so very rich either. He was engaged in a business so vividly competitive that Marie's brother was hurried through college as fast as possible and brought into the game at twenty-two with every nerve stretched taut.
Nothing like that was expected of Marie. She was brought up to think that leisure was woman's natural estate. Work, for any girl, she regarded as an accident due to the unexpected and usually reprehensible collapse of the males of the poor girl's family.
This view of the matter gave Marie UNCONSCIOUSLY TO HERSELF, what morality she had. Hard drinking, "illegitimate" gambling, and excessive dissipations of all sorts are observed commonly to have a prejudicial effect on male efficiency and family prosperity. Against all "vices," therefore (although she didn't catch the "therefore"), Marie was a Moral Force of a million angel-power.
Aside from "vices," however, all kinds of conduct looked much alike to her. Ethics is the rules of the game, the decencies of the struggle for existence. Marie had no part in the struggle. She violated its decencies without being at all aware of it.
All the way, for instance, from stealing a place in the line in front of a box-office window ahead of ten persons who were there before her, up the tiny scale of petty aggressions within her narrow reach to the cool climax of spending three months every summer in a pine-wood mountain resort (thus depriving her city-bound husband of the personal companionship which was the one best thing she had to give him in return for what he gave her), she was as competent a little grafter as the town afforded.