We were married within a month of our commencement, after three years of courtship at a big Middle West university. Looking back, it seems to me that rich, tumultuous college life of ours was wholly pagan. All about us was the free-handed atmosphere of "easy money," and in our "crowd" a tacit implication that a good time was one of the primary necessities of life. Such were our ideas when we married on a salary of one hundred dollars a month. We took letters of introduction to some of the "smart" people in a suburb near Chicago, and they proved so delightfully cordial that we settled down among them without stopping to consider the discrepancies between their ways and our income. We were put up at a small country club—a simple affair enough, comparatively speaking—that demanded six weeks' salary in initial dues and much more in actual subsequent expense. "Everybody" went out for Saturday golf and stayed for dinner and dancing.
By fall there was in working operation a dinner club of the "younger married set," as our local column in the city papers called us; an afternoon bridge club; and a small theater club that went into town every fortnight for dinner and a show. Costly little amusements, but hardly more than were due charming young people of our opportunities and tastes. I think that was our attitude, although we did not admit it. In September we rented a "smart" little apartment. We had planned to furnish it by means of several generous checks which were family contributions to our array of wedding gifts. What we did was to buy the furniture on the instalment plan, agreeing to pay twenty dollars a month till the bill was settled, and we put the furniture money into running expenses.
It was the beginning of a custom. They gave most generously, that older generation. Visiting us, Max's mother would slip a bill into my always empty purse when we went shopping; or mine would drop a gold piece into my top bureau drawer for me to find after she had gone. And there were always checks for birthdays.
Everything went into running expenses; yet, in spite of it, our expenses ran quite away. Max said I was "too valuable a woman to put into the kitchen," so we hired a maid, good-humoredly giving her carte blanche on the grocery and meat market. Our bills, for all our dining out, were enormous. There were clothes, too. Max delighted in silk socks and tailored shirts, and he ordered his monogramed cigarettes by the thousand. My own taste ran to expensive little hats.
It is hardly necessary to recount the details. We had our first tremendous quarrel at the end of six months, when, in spite of our furniture money and our birthday checks, we found ourselves two hundred and fifty dollars in debt. But as we cooled we decided that there was nothing we could do without; we could only be "more careful."
Every month we reached that same conclusion. There was nothing we could do without. At the end of the year on a $1200 salary we were $700 behind; eight months later, after our first baby came, we were over a thousand—and by that time, it seemed, permanently estranged. I actually was carrying out a threat of separation and stripping the apartment, one morning, when Max came back from town and sat down to discuss matters with me.
A curious labyrinthine discussion it was, winding from recriminations and flat admissions that our marriage was a failure and our love was dead, to the most poignant memories of our engagement days. But its central point was Max's detached insistence that we make marriage over into a purely utilitarian affair.
"Man needs the decencies of a home," he said over and over. "It doesn't do a fellow any good with a firm like mine to have them know he can't manage his affairs. And my firm is the kind of firm I want to work for. This next year is important; and if I spend it dragging through a nasty divorce business, knowing that everybody knows, I'll be about thirty per cent efficient. I'm willing to admit that marriage—even a frost like ours—is useful. Will you?"
I had to. My choice rested between going home, where there were two younger sisters, or leaving the baby somewhere and striking out for myself.
"It seems to me," said Max, taking out his pencil, "that if two reasonably clever people can put their best brain power and eight hours a day into a home, it might amount to something sometime. The thing resolves itself into a choice between the things we can do without and the things we can't. We'll list them. We can't do without three meals and a roof; but there must be something."