But what a preparation for it had Marie!
She flinched from it. The inertia of her mind carried her to the ultimate logic of her life. Along about the time of her marriage she began to cease to be the typical normal girl of her type.
She became a woman of the future—OF HER TYPE.
From the facts of modern idleness the positive character reacts toward new-found activity: toward an enormous, never-before-witnessed expenditure of intelligent care on children; toward self-support; toward civic service. The character which is neither positive nor negative runs along as a neutral mixture of modern facts and of old ideals of casual idling and of casual child-rearing. The negative character—like Marie's—just yields to the facts and is swept along by them into final irresponsibility and inutility.
Marie wasn't negative enough—she wasn't positive enough in her negativeness—to plunge into dissipation. It wasn't in her nature to do any plunging of any kind. Good, safe, motionless sponging was her instinct. And she will die in the odor of tubbed and scrubbed respectability. And if you knew her you would like her very much. She is charming.
When she and Chunk were married, they went to live in an apartment appropriate to a rising young man, and Marie's job was on all occasions to look as appropriate as the apartment.
No shallow cynicism, this! Just plain, bald truth without any wig on it. The only thing that you could put your finger on that Marie really did was so to wear clothes and so to give parties as to be the barometer of her husband's prosperity. And in every city you can see lots of such barometers giving themselves an artificially high reading in order to create that "atmosphere" of success which is a recognized commercial asset.
Chunk was hugely pleased with Marie. She looked good at the dinner-table in the cafe of their apartment building. She knew how to order the right dishes when they entertained and dined down-town. She made it possible for him to return deftly and engagingly the social attentions of older people. She completed the "front" of his life, and he not only supported her but, as Miss Salmon, of Vassar, flippantly and seriously says, he "sported" her as he might a diamond shirt stud.
No struggle in Marie's life so far! No HAVING to swim in the cold water of daily enforced duty or else sink. NO BEING ACCUSTOMED TO THE DISAGREEABLE FEEL OF THAT WATER.
She had missed work. That was nothing. She had missed being
HARDENED to work. That was everything.