Now it could not have been the woman who desires economic independence through self-support who was responsible for the ultimate aversion to childbearing in the Roman world—for SHE did not exist. It could not have been the woman who desires full citizenship—for she did not exist. What economic power and what political power the Roman Empire woman desired and achieved was parasitic—the economic power which comes from the inheritance of estates, the political power which comes from the exercise of sexual charm.
The one essential difference between the women of that ancient modern world and the women of this contemporary modern world is in the emergence, along with really democratic ideals, of the agitation for equal economic and political opportunity.
The other kind of New Woman, the woman brought up throughout her girlhood in a home in which there is no adequate employment for her; trained to no tasks, or, at any rate, to tasks (like dusting the dining-room and counting the laundry) so petty, so ridiculously irrelevant that her great-grandmother did them in the intervals of her real work; going then into marriage with none of the discipline of habitual encounter with inescapable toil; taken by her husband not to share his struggle but his prosperity—that sort of New Woman they had, just as we have her in smaller number, it is true, but in identical character.
They tell us it was "luxury" that ruined the Romans. But was luxury the START? Wasn't it only the means to the FINISH?
Eating a grouse destroys in itself, no more moral fiber than eating a ham sandwich. Bismarck, whether he slept on eider-down or on straw, arose Bismarck.
The person who has a job and who does it is very considerably immunized against the consequences of luxury. First, because he is giving a return for it. Second, because he hasn't much time for it.
On the other hand we see the hobo who won't work ruining himself on the luxury of stable-floors and of free-lunch counters, just as thoroughly as any nobleman who won't work can ever ruin himself on the luxury of castles and game preserves.
It is clearly the habitual enjoyment of either grouse or ham sandwiches, of either eiderdown or straw, WITHOUT SERVICE RENDERED AND WITHOUT FATIGUE ENDURED, that ultimately desiccates the moral character and drains it of all capacity for effort.
Marie was as reasonable a proposition as that two and two make four.
She had given her early, plastic, formative years to acquiring the HABIT of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an effort came, the effort just wasn't in her.