The new aristocracy was as hospitably large as the old aristocracy had been sternly small. Before Wyatt, leisure had been the thinnest of exhalations along the very top of society. Since Wyatt, it has got diffused in greater and greater density through at least the upper third of it. And for all that magical extension of free time, wrested from the ceaseless toil with which God cursed Adam, we stand indebted (and so recently!) 145 to the machinery set going by that spontaneous explosion of artisan genius in England only a hundred and fifty years ago, kept going (and faster and faster) by the labor of men, women, and children behind factory windows, the world over, to-day.
Marie’s view of the situation, however, is the usual one. We are billions of miles from really realizing that leisure is produced by somebody’s work, that just “Being a Good Woman” or “Being a Decent Fellow” is so far from being an adequate return for the toil of other people that it is just exactly no return at all. We are billions of miles from admitting that the virtuous parasite is just as much a parasite as the vicious parasite:—that the former differs from the latter in the use of the money but not at all in the matter of getting it in return for nothing.
Getting something for nothing is the fundamental immorality of the world. But we don’t believe it. There will be a revolution before we get it into our heads that trying to trade a sweet disposition or an intelligent appreciation of opera or a proficiency at amateur tennis for three meals a day is a fraud.
Marie didn’t mean to commit a fraud. She just dropped a sentimental, non-negotiable plugged nickel into the slot-machine of life and drew out a motor-car and a country place, and was innocently pleased. Such a wonderful slot-machine! She never saw the laboring multitudes behind it, past and present multitudes, dead fingers, living fingers, big men’s fingers, little children’s fingers, pulling the strings, delivering the prizes, laying aside the plugged nickel in the treasury of a remote revenge.
TO CURE A HEADACHE—WORKING-GIRL THERAPY: TAKE A GOOD JOB AND STIR IT CONSTANTLY FROM BREAKFAST TO SUPPER.
Perhaps the reason why she didn’t catch on to the fact that, instead of being the world’s creditor, she was really inhabiting an almshouse was that she was so busy.