Marie was enervated not by her luxury but by 172 her failure to pay for her luxury. She wouldn’t have had to pay much. Her luxury was petty. But she paid nothing. And her failure to pay was just as big as if her luxury had been bigger. Getting three thousand a year in return for nothing leaves you morally just as bankrupt as if you had got three million.
Marie came to her abdication of life’s greatest effort not by wearing too many clothes or by eating too many foods but by becoming accustomed to getting clothes and foods and all other things without the smallest effort.
She had given her early, plastic, formative years to acquiring the habit of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an effort came, the effort just wasn’t in her.
Her complete withdrawal from the struggle for existence had at last, in her negative, non-resistive mind, atrophied all the instincts of that struggle, including finally the instinct for reproduction.
The instinct for reproduction is intricately involved in the struggle for existence. The individual struggles for perpetuation, for perpetuation in person, for perpetuation in posterity. 173 Work, the perpetuation of one’s own life in strain and pain; work, the clinging to existence in spite of its blows; work, the inuring of the individual to the penalties of existence, is linked psychologically to the power and desire for continued racial life. The individual, the class, which struggles no more will in the end reproduce itself no more. In not having had to conquer life, it has lost its will to live.
The detailed daily reasons for this social law stand clear in Marie’s life. It is a strong law. Its triumph in Marie could have been thwarted only by the presence in her of a certain other social law. Authority!
The woman who is coerced by Authority, the woman who is operated by ideals introduced into her from without, will bear children even when she does not feel the active wish to bear them. She will bear them just because the authoritative expectation is that she shall bear them.
But Marie was free!
She was free from the requirement of an heir for the family estate. The modern form of property, requiring no male warrior for its defense 174 in the next generation, had done that for her.
She was free from the dictates of historic Christianity about conjugal duty and unrestricted reproduction. Modern Protestantism had done that for her.