Here is what they had done for her:
They had removed from her life all need, and finally all desire, to make efforts and to accomplish results through struggle in defiance of difficulty and at the cost of pain.
Work and pain were the two things Marie was on no account to be exposed to. With this small but important reservation:
She might work at avoiding pain.
When the cook had a headache she took Getting Breakfast for it. When Marie had a headache she worked not at breakfast but at the headache.
It was a social ceremony of large proportions, 136 with almost everybody among those present, from the doctor down through Mother and Auntie to Little Sister. The decorations, which were very elaborate, comprised, besides the usual tasteful arrangement of thermometers, eau-de-Karlsbad, smelling-salts bottles, cracked ice, and chocolate creams, a perfect shower of tourmaline roses, the odor of which, alone among all the vegetable odors in the world, had been found after long experimentation to be soothing to Marie on such occasions. It was not thought that Marie could vanquish a headache except after a plucky fight of at least one day’s duration.
Actresses go on and do their turns day after day and night after night with hardly a miss. Marie’s troubles were no more numerous than theirs. But they were much larger. Troubles are like gases. They expand to fill any void into which they are introduced. Marie’s spread themselves through a vacuum as large as her life.
The making of that vacuum and the inserting of Marie into it cost her father and her husband prodigious toil and was a great pleasure to 137 them. Marie belonged to the Leisure Class. Socially, she was therefore distinctly superior to her father and her husband.
