WORK? FOR MARIE? FOR MY DAUGHTER? SHOCKING!
President Thomas of Bryn Mawr had Marie in mind when she said:
“By the leisured class we mean in America the class whose men work harder than any other men in the excitement of professional and commercial 138 rivalry, but whose women constitute the only leisured class we have and the most leisured class in the world.”
Marie’s father wasn’t so very rich, either. He was engaged in a business so vividly competitive that Marie’s brother was hurried through college as fast as possible and brought into the game at twenty-two with every nerve stretched taut.
Nothing like that was expected of Marie. She was brought up to think that leisure was woman’s natural estate. Work, for any girl, she regarded as an accident due to the unexpected and usually reprehensible collapse of the males of the poor girl’s family.
This view of the matter gave Marie, unconsciously to herself, what morality she had. Hard drinking, “illegitimate” gambling, and excessive dissipations of all sorts are observed commonly to have a prejudicial effect on male efficiency and on family prosperity. Against all “vices,” therefore (although she didn’t catch the “therefore”), Marie was a Moral Force of a million angel-power.
Aside from “vices,” however, all kinds of 139 conduct looked much alike to her. Ethics is the rules of the game, the decencies of the struggle for existence. Marie had no part in the struggle. She violated its decencies without being at all aware of it.
All the way, for instance, from stealing a place in the line in front of a box-office window ahead of ten persons who were there before her, up the tiny scale of petty aggressions within her narrow reach to the cool climax of spending three months every summer in a pine-wood mountain resort (thus depriving her city-bound husband of the personal companionship which was the one best thing she had to give him in return for what he gave her), she was as competent a little grafter as the town afforded.
But she was a perfectly logical one. Her family had trained her to deadhead her way through life and she did it. Finally she went beyond their expectations. They hadn’t quite anticipated all of the sweetly undeviating inertia of her mind.
Nevertheless she was a nice girl. In fact, she was The Nice Girl. She was sweet-tempered, sweet-mannered, and sweet-spoken—a 140 perfect dear. She never did a “bad” thing in her life. And she never ceased from her career of moral forcing. She wrote to her husband from her mountain fastness, warning him against high-balls in hot weather. She went twice a month during the winter to act as librarian for an evening at a settlement in a district which was inhabited by perfectly respectable working people but which, while she passed out the books, she sympathetically alluded to as a “slum.”