You see, she not only did things all the time but she had to find and invent them to do. Her life, even before she was married, was much more difficult than her brother’s, who simply got up in the morning and took the same old 7.42 to the same old office.
When he wanted clothes he went to the nearest decent tailor.
No such cinch for Marie. Her tailor lived in Sutherton, on the directly opposite side of the city from the suburb in which Marie lived. Just to get to that tailor’s cost Marie an hour and a half of effort. She had got up early, but by the time the tailor had stuck the world’s visible supply of pins into the lines of her new coat, most of the forenoon had been arduously occupied.
Of course many forenoons had to be thus occupied. Never forget it! The modish adaptation of woven fabrics to the female contour becomes increasingly complex and minute and 148 exacting and time-occupying in precise proportion as the amount of time increases for which occupation must be devised.
Besides, it gives employment to the tailors.
This is the really meritorious function of the leisure class. It gives employment. And every extension of its tastes and needs gives more employment. Marie and her friends greatly increased the number and prosperity of tailors and milliners and candy-dippers and perfume-manufacturers and manicurists and hairdressers and plumed-bird hunters and florists and cab-drivers and Irish lace-makers and Chinese silkworm tenders and violet-and-orris sachet-powder makers and matinée heroes and French nuns who embroider underwear and fur-traders and pearl-divers and other deserving persons, not forgetting the multitudes of Turks who must make nougat or perish.
In fact, Marie and her friends, in the course of a year, gave as much employment as a fair-sized earthquake. That is, in the course of a year, they destroyed, without return, a large amount of wealth and set many people to work replacing it. If we had a large enough leisure 149 class we should have no need of fires and railroad wrecks and the other valuable events which increase our prosperity by consuming it.
Marie belonged to the real Consumers’ League. And she consumed prettily and virtuously. It wasn’t bad air that suffocated her soul. It was no air.
