But she was a perfectly logical one. Her family had trained her to deadhead her way through life and she did it. Finally she went beyond their expectations. They hadn't quite anticipated all of the sweetly undeviating inertia of her mind.
Nevertheless she was a nice girl. In fact; she was The Nice Girl. She was sweet-tempered, sweet-mannered, and sweet-spoken—a perfect dear. She never did a "bad" thing in her life. And she never ceased from her career of moral forcing. She wrote to her husband from her mountain fastness, warning him against high-balls in hot weather. She went twice a month during the winter to act as librarian for an evening at a settlement in a district which was inhabited by perfectly respectable working people but which, while she passed out the books, she sympathetically alluded to as a "slum."
It is hardly fair, however, to lay the whole explanation of Marie on her father, her husband, and herself.
A few years ago, in the churchyard of St. Philip's Church at Birmingham, they set up a tombstone which had fallen down, and they re-inscribed it in honor of the long-neglected memory of the man who had been resting beneath it for a century and a half. His name was Wyatt. John Wyatt. He had a good deal to do with making Marie what she was.
What toil, what tossing nights, what sweating days, what agonized wrenching of the imagination toward a still unreached idea, have gone into the making of leisure—for other people!
Wyatt strained toward, and touched, the idea which was the real start of modern leisure.
In the year 1733, coming from the cathedral town of Lichfield, where the Middle Ages still lingered, he set up, in a small building near Sutton Coldfields, a certain machine. That machine inaugurated, and forever symbolizes, the long and glorious series of mechanical triumphs which has made a large degree of leisure possible, not for a few thousand women, as was previously the case, but for millions and millions of them.
It was only about two feet square. But it accomplished a thing never before accomplished. It spun the first thread ever spun in the history of the world without the intervention of human fingers.
On that night woman lost her oldest and most significant title and function. The Spinster ceased to be.
The mistress and her maid, spinning together in the Hall, their fingers drawing the roving from the distaff and stretching it out as the spindle twisted it, were finally on the point of separating forever.