“And the young people,” I urged—“those who are just starting in life—how do they manage? Say when the husband has $1500 or $2000 a year?”
“Poor things!” she returned. “I don't know how they manage. They board till they go distracted, or they dry up and blow away; or else the wife has a little money, too, and they take a small flat and ruin themselves. Of course, they want to live nicely and like other people.”
“But if they didn't?”
“Why, then they could live delightfully. My husband says he often wishes he was a master-mechanic in New York, with a thousand a year, and a flat for twelve dollars a month; he would have the best time in the world.”
Her husband nodded his acquiescence. “Fighting-cock wouldn't be in it,” he said. “Trouble is, we all want to do the swell thing.”
“But you can't all do it,” I ventured, “and, from what I see of the simple, out-of-the-way neighborhoods in my walks, you don't all try.”
“Why, no,” he said. “Some of us were talking about that the other night at the club, and one of the fellows was saying that he believed there was as much old-fashioned, quiet, almost countrified life in New York, among the great mass of the people, as you'd find in any city in the world. Said you met old codgers that took care of their own furnaces, just as you would in a town of five thousand inhabitants.”
“Yes, that's all very well,” said his wife; “but they wouldn't be nice people. Nice people want to live nicely. And so they live beyond their means or else they scrimp and suffer. I don't know which is worst.”
“But there is no obligation to do either?” I asked.
“Oh yes, there is,” she returned. “If you've been born in a certain way, and brought up in a certain way, you can't get out of it. You simply can't. You have got to keep in it till you drop. Or a woman has.”