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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78473 ***
+
+
+
+
+  REFLECTIONS OF
+  A BEGINNING HUSBAND
+
+  BY
+  EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN
+
+  AUTHOR OF
+  “THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN”
+  “LUCID INTERVALS,” ETC.
+
+  [Illustration]
+
+  HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+  NEW YORK AND LONDON
+  MCMXIII
+
+
+
+
+  COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
+
+  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
+
+  PUBLISHED APRIL, 1913
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  CHAP.                                                   PAGE
+
+  I. BY THE SECOND INTENTION                                 1
+
+  II. SOME DETAILS OF LIVING                                27
+
+  III. COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT                          52
+
+  IV. THE BABY                                              73
+
+  V. A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE                        94
+
+  VI. POLITICS                                             116
+
+  VII. WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION                   125
+
+  VIII. MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE                               146
+
+
+
+
+  REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING
+  HUSBAND
+
+
+
+
+  REFLECTIONS OF
+  A BEGINNING HUSBAND
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+BY THE SECOND INTENTION
+
+
+“Dear Mr. French,” my letter began, “Cordelia and I have a mind again
+to get married. But having once been engaged and quit, we have no mind
+at all to be engaged again and divulge it. Would you mind, please, you
+and Mrs. French, if we eloped? It seems so much the more feasible and
+private way.”
+
+I would rather have broken it to him by word of mouth, but for some
+things it is written words or none. If you have determined to elope
+with a man’s daughter you can’t very well go and ask leave of him.
+Suppose he objects! Of course he will object, especially after
+consulting his wife. The only way, if you propose to consult him at
+all, is to write, and mail the letter on the way to the church and come
+back to the house afterward for the answer.
+
+Cordelia felt she just couldn’t be publicly engaged to me again. Of
+course I didn’t mind. I think meanly of the engaged state _per se_, but
+I had always rather be engaged to Cordelia than not. But that was only
+because I had always wanted to marry her, and had been glad to throw
+any convenient obstacle, even an engagement, in the way of her marrying
+any one else. The thing that had bothered me was to have the engagement
+end without our being married. I wanted to have it die a natural death
+in church, with flowers and a minister, and it had irked me very sore
+indeed to be “released” like a baseball-player before the end of the
+season. It left me on a miserably awkward footing with the rest of the
+world and with her, and it left her in the same case. Nobody quite
+knew whether to congratulate either of us on getting rid of the other.
+People naturally wanted to know why, and of course you can’t tell in
+the newspaper. It was awkward for our families. There was a feeling
+that they ought to quarrel, because somebody must be to blame, and the
+other side ought to resent it. But they didn’t want to quarrel, and
+wouldn’t; not even a little, to keep up appearances. They held their
+tongues and went on about their business as before, but inevitably
+flocked more apart than they had been wont to do, because when they met
+it excited too much interest.
+
+I don’t mean that they were such conspicuous people that the London
+papers had cables about them. It was only that when Mrs. Fessenden
+or Mrs. Somebody Else got home from the Jenkinses’ tea she told her
+family, and whomever she had to dinner, that Mrs. French and Harriet
+and Mrs. Jesup were at the Jenkinses’ and spoke, as they passed, as
+politely as though nothing had happened. And then would follow a little
+chattering tribute of discourse about Cordelia French and Peregrine
+Jesup, and why did they break their engagement, anyway!
+
+Not that my family, or Cordelia’s, got direct reports of what was
+said at Mrs. Fessenden’s dinner-table. They didn’t; at least, not
+often. But they knew what must have been said, and families don’t like
+to be subjects of speculation or of critical or even compassionate
+observation. They can bear the eye of approval, of admiration, and
+even of a moderate envy, but what family likes to have the Fessendens,
+the Jenkinses, the Underharrows, the Overtons, and the rest of the
+families getting their heads together to swap surmises as to what the
+Frenches and the Jesups have got in their closet!
+
+Maybe you’d like to know why Cordelia and I loosed hands after our
+intentions had been six months on file. In this private way why should
+I not explain that it was not so much the fault of either of us as of
+the conditions of life as we found them. You see, I was twenty-three,
+and Cordelia was two years younger. I was studying the profession
+in which I hope to be useful in my day and generation, and by the
+practice of which I hope to derive a respectable maintenance from a
+contributory world, which Cordelia was already inspecting. That’s what
+she was doing. She was out of school and looking about, shifting from
+continent to continent to get a better view; getting acquainted with
+people and things, ascertaining whom and what she liked and what places
+seemed more joyous to her than others. What for so much inspection
+and investigation to prepare her for a destiny already measured off,
+tied up, and waiting to be called for? If she had been in college,
+she might possibly have kept. I don’t know what are the merits of the
+women’s colleges as depositories for engaged girls, but they may have
+a value for that use. But a roving life of enlargement by travel and
+social experience has no such value at all. There was I, tied up to
+professional studies, on such allowances as my indulgent parents could
+afford me without too gross injustice to their own family life and
+their obligations to their other dependents. And there was Cordelia,
+diligently qualifying herself to live creditably and profitably on an
+income of from twelve thousand a year up.
+
+You might suppose that ordinary precautions would have been taken to
+prevent her from seeing much of a person so unsuited to her needs as
+I, but they were not. There was nothing against me: I had no criminal
+record, did not drink much, was of respectable origin, had known
+Cordelia a long time already, and was such a person, in a general way,
+as she might properly enough marry sometime, if circumstances suited.
+Cordelia came out, and went to dances and dinners. She had to dance
+with somebody. Male persons of the dancing age and disposition with
+incomes of from twelve thousand up are rather scarce. Dances cannot
+be equipped with such alone: neither can dinners. So Cordelia danced
+with anybody who asked her soon enough, and that was often me; and
+she ate her dinner alongside of whoever was put next to her, and that
+was sometimes me. And when it wasn’t me I wished it was; and so what
+happened, happened all in natural course and according to reasonable
+expectation, and nobody ventured to disprove, though doubtless there
+was a fair volume of conjecture as to whose money Cordelia French and
+Peregrine Jesup proposed to get married on. But we had not selected
+anybody to underwrite our prospective happiness. We had not got so
+far as that. We had just got irresponsibly engaged, according to the
+American plan and the spontaneous promptings of youth and affection.
+
+What about our current American practice of turning most of the girls
+loose from school at eighteen or nineteen and keeping most of the
+youths, who are their natural mates, tied up to professional studies
+or business apprenticeships four or five years longer, and letting
+them play together meanwhile, and expecting them to shape their own
+destinies on practical and satisfactory lines? Isn’t a good deal
+expected of us young people, all tinder, sparks, and indiscretion? The
+French, they tell me, expect less and provide more. I have thought a
+good deal of these concerns since Cordelia and I were first engaged
+and found our intentions unseasonable. Of course, I wanted to be
+considered in Cordelia’s plans and deportment; wanted, naturally, to
+have her stay around where I could see her at recess and on Sundays
+and other holidays, and perhaps meet her at festive gatherings when
+the urgency of my studies permitted me to get to them. I liked to
+have her around handy, but of course I could not interdict her from
+going about, or even from going beyond the seas when it suited her
+parents to take her. I could say that she had already seen as much
+of the world and the people in it as was necessary, but how was I
+to insist that, while I was cultivating and improving my abilities
+all I knew how, Cordelia should let most of hers lie fallow and mark
+time and wait? If she had only had a steady job to work at in the
+intermission while I was qualifying myself to work at mine, things
+might have worked out serenely; but the only job she had was to get
+married, and meanwhile to cheer and satisfy her parents, and try to
+be worth her keep to them while she was making acquaintance with the
+world. Marriage seems to be a complete occupation (circumstances being
+favorable), but being engaged isn’t. It’s just a makeshift, delightful
+for six weeks, very suitable for three months, and tolerable for six;
+but when it contemplates indefinite extension into uncertain years it
+is an asset of very doubtful value to a girl in active social life.
+When the Frenches found that Cordelia seemed to be losing interest in
+affairs, was indifferent to dances and dinners, was apt to be abandoned
+by mankind to the society of chaperones, was getting left out of
+house-parties that I could not go to, was gently indisposed to put the
+sea or any wide expanse of land between herself and me, and was rather
+aggravated than appeased by the little she could see of me when I was
+near, they said--the parents did: “This isn’t working to much of a
+charm! Nobody is ahead on it, and we are getting behind. Cordelia’s no
+fun any more, and there is no end of it in sight.”
+
+And soon after Cordelia and I called our engagement off, much to our
+grief and with the sympathy of our elders. I advised her to put me
+down to the account of experience, and try to figure out a profit on
+me, if she could. But I never put her down to account of anything,
+being of just the same mind about her that I always had been, though
+grievously put out to leave her blooming on the paternal bush without
+any “hands-off” sign on her, protected only by her natural thorns.
+
+There was a line in the paper to say the engagement was off, Cordelia
+went abroad again, I continued my studies, and time went on. It does go
+on somehow; the trick is to keep on going with it. Who does that, gets
+somewhere in spite of impediments, lacerations of the affections, and
+all misgivings about the possibility of there being a gap anywhere in
+the procession of self-supporters that a new aspirant can fit himself
+into. I have been called “sensible.” It seems a painfully tame thing
+to be, and I presume I was called so by way of disparagement. But,
+after all, there are times when there is no choice but between being
+sensible and being silly, and then you have just got to be sensible if
+you can, no matter how it tastes. Being sensible, while one is working
+to get a start in life, must be excused, because it is the price of
+adventure, indiscretion, speculation--all the really glorious and
+spectacular parts of human existence.
+
+Three years I was sensible and plugged away at my job, learning the
+rudiments and then the application of them. All that time I had never
+a word with Cordelia. How could I? I could not go on where I left off,
+and unless, or until, I could do that, how could I go on at all? Sight
+of her I did have now and then, but seldom; for, though she was often
+in town and I nearly always there, our occupations usually kept us from
+accidental meetings. We didn’t travel the same beats.
+
+I finished my professional studies, sustained the tests provided to
+measure my proficiency, and got a job in an office with a small salary
+and some prospects. Candor requires that I admit that I passed those
+examinations pretty well, for really I had not spared work in the long
+preparation for them.
+
+And the job I got was a good one as beginners’ jobs go, and the
+prospects were as good, so far as I could see, as the prospects of
+anybody of my time of life and in my line of endeavor. So I didn’t see
+why, barring accidents, I should not get somewhere presently.
+
+So the months sped. Coming early up-town on a late October day, I got
+into a pay-as-you-enter car at Forty-second Street, and there was
+Cordelia, alone and with a seat vacant beside her, which I took.
+
+“This is a fine day,” said I, “and you become it very much, and I hope
+you have good health?”
+
+“Oh yes,” said Cordelia.
+
+“And good spirits?” said I.
+
+“Oh yes;” but she said it more doubtfully and with no more than a
+languid affirmation.
+
+“And I hope that sport is good,” said I; and she assented to that,
+but in a way that suggested that it might be more boisterously
+satisfactory. And with that we fell into discourse, trifling but
+easy, and that progressed in its tone from easy to friendly, and from
+friendly to old-friendly. And I let the car pass Fifty-fourth Street
+and pretended to myself I was going to Fifty-ninth, and let it pass
+Fifty-ninth and pretended nothing further to myself. It wasn’t until
+some days later that I learned that her intended destination was
+Fifty-seventh Street. As it was, while rolling through the Sixties
+we each cautiously discovered that we were bound for the Museum at
+Eighty-second Street, and there we got off; and since it was, as I
+pointed out to her, too lovely an autumn day to go indoors, we went
+and sat down in the Park instead, and there, a little off the track
+of passers-by, fell into discussion of the conditions of contemporary
+existence.
+
+“Cordelia,” said I, “are you having any fun?”
+
+She meditated a moment. Three years is a long time in the early
+twenties, and Cordelia had grown perceptibly thoughtfuler since she and
+I left off.
+
+“Fun? Oh yes, I have _some_. It has been a pleasant summer. We went
+abroad in the spring, and it was nice in the country after we got home.
+People were sometimes interesting; some of the books were good to read;
+I liked the flowers in the garden, and I liked to ride a horse, and
+sometimes motoring was pleasant, and the swimming and the sailing.”
+
+I confess that my heart settled back a bit at this list of profitable
+occupations. “Are you marrying any one this fall, Cordelia?” said I.
+“Have you an interesting line of suitors now? Or can it be that being
+well off you have the unusual discretion to realize it?”
+
+“Oh, I realize it; yes, a good deal. But I am only temporarily well
+off.”
+
+“What’s the matter? Father’s stocks look shaky to you?”
+
+“Oh no. Father doesn’t seem anxious.”
+
+“Suitors, maybe. Perhaps you feel yourself near capitulation?”
+
+“Possibly! But I have not diagnosed it so.”
+
+“Down there where you spend your summers there are stock-brokers
+growing on every bush, and the stock-brokers, you know, Cordelia, are
+the only _young_ men--except the hereditary rich--who have money enough
+to get married on.”
+
+“Why didn’t you turn to that yourself, Peregrine?”
+
+“I? Bless you! I never had a chance. Nobody ever seemed to see the
+making of a stock-broker in me. And besides--well, I confess I have
+never felt drawn to that vocation. I would like uncommonly well to
+earn plenty of money, and I mean to, sometime; but I’d rather have the
+pay seem more like an incident of my job than have my job an incident
+of my pay.”
+
+“I’m afraid you are not a really earnest money-maker, Peregrine?”
+
+“Just wait till I get a chance to throw in my clutch; then you’ll
+see! And I’ll soon begin to get it now! But if you think well of the
+stock-broker calling, Cordelia, there was Archibald Tassel. I heard of
+him as having the discernment to be your warm admirer; and a wholesome,
+hearty young man too, and well found. And yet you seem never to have
+smiled on him?”
+
+“So?”
+
+“It must be you don’t care for a sporting life. Well, I am only
+moderately drawn to it myself. You have to work so hard and pay so
+high for what you get, and it’s so hard on the tissues, and you get
+so little in the end. But there was that cheerful young Van Terminal,
+Cordelia; pockets bulging with ancestral coin; nice manners, immense
+energy, large appetite for pleasure, four or five automobiles in his
+garage, and a private tank of gasolene with a pipe-line connection
+with Hunters Point. If there is an eligible young man about, it is
+Corlear Van Terminal, and yet, Cordelia--”
+
+“Mercy, Peregrine, would you have me marry him?”
+
+“Oh no! By no means. No! No! I never was the least keen to have you.
+But why didn’t you?”
+
+“Why should I?”
+
+“Everything money can buy, and not such a bad encumbrance. Amiable
+young man enough, and you with your great qualifications for
+companionship and direction might have kept him out of serious
+mischief all his days. I don’t say you could have done it, but it was
+conceivably possible.”
+
+“He’s very nice and so jocund. Mother and I were much pleased with
+him--are still. I don’t know what efforts I should have made if it
+hadn’t been for father.”
+
+“What did _he_ say?”
+
+“I hardly like to tell you!”
+
+“Oh yes, do!”
+
+“He said: ‘Good God! Cordelia. Not that one! Wait, and perhaps you may
+catch a _man_! Leave those joyous natures to marry chorus girls,’
+he said, and told me I was built for something better than to be the
+ballast for a joy-rider’s motor-car. That’s just like father. He’s not
+very practical. But it flattered me, and I didn’t try after that.”
+
+“Poor girl! What a father! What a tremendous handicap parents are,
+anyway!”
+
+“You needn’t complain of father. That was the only time he meddled.
+He has done his best for me. He knows admirable young men! ‘Father’s
+friends,’ I call them. Somehow they never make up to me. But I’m
+improving; I know I am. I think so much my hair is coming out, and the
+day may come when I shall find grace in the eyes of one of ‘father’s
+friends.’”
+
+“Oh no! Cordelia, don’t! I have a better plan for you. I know such a
+good young man, who has needed you with gnawing destitution, night and
+day going on four years.”
+
+“How interesting! The poor young man! Destitute of me and I suppose
+of all the other goods of this world, and mortgaged besides for the
+support of his aged grandmother! I beg you, Peregrine, not to attempt
+to entangle me with impossible good young men. Life is too fleeting.
+The American spring is too short. All in a minute is it summer, and
+to-morrow comes Fourth of July and haytime, and we are cut down and
+cast into the oven.”
+
+“Well, dear Cordelia, take a broker--take a broker! Or some nice old
+gentleman; or a widower or something, with ready-made shekels strung on
+him!”
+
+“Don’t be unkind to me, Peregrine!”
+
+“Oh, well--I was telling you--where was I? You put me all out when
+you speak like that. Oh yes--the good young destitute man! Well, the
+good young man has no grandmother to support--only himself as yet, and
+can do that, by George! And it’s time; he’s rising twenty-seven. And
+his prospects are not bad now. And if he could manage to get married
+they’d be better; they’d have to be. You see, we have to get one thing
+at a time, and I’ve known awful cases--even I in my short experience
+have observed them--of men who waited until they had got a good living
+before they got married, and found, when they got ready to get a wife,
+that their minds had been on other things so long that they had clean
+forgotten how. That’s awful, isn’t it? It happens all the time. I
+see it at the clubs. I don’t want it to happen to--to the good young
+semi-destitute man I had in mind.”
+
+“Oh no, Peregrine; surely not. It’s an awful thought; awful! But yet,
+suppose he got the girl, what--”
+
+“What costs so dreadfully much, Cordelia? I know of quite a decent
+flat for fifty dollars a month; a nice flat over a tailor shop, and
+not in Harlem either--not twenty blocks from where we’re sitting.
+And for three dollars a day you can get food enough for two or three
+persons--eggs not superlatively fresh, perhaps, but eggs--and for a
+dollar a day you can hire a very good servant, and that’s only a little
+more than forty dollars a week; and a good young man of twenty-seven,
+with four or five years of hard work behind him, who can’t see his way
+to lay his hands on at least sixty dollars a week isn’t good enough for
+you. But sixty would about do it, Cordelia. Sixty plunks is a great
+deal of money--a whole lot of money to earn--but not an unattainable
+wage; not one that a diligent and competent trained hand need consider
+the limit of his aspirations--no, not in a city like this with a
+traction company to be supported, and eighty million people in the
+back country to help pay five millions of us for living here.”
+
+“You are a more calculating person than you used to be, Peregrine. When
+did you work all that out? And suppose it were possible to live on
+sixty dollars a week, what makes you think it would pay to do it, and
+why do most people of our habits think they need so very much more?”
+
+“The trouble with them is they haven’t been emancipated. The things
+that cost are amusement and social aspirations. If you can cut those
+out for a time, living is not so impossibly dear. But stupid people
+can’t do it, and unemancipated people don’t dare to.”
+
+“Unemancipated? Unemancipated! Unemancipated from what, Peregrine?”
+
+“From _things_, Cordelia, and the habit of needing them in superfluous
+quantity; from the standards of living set by people who are poor on
+fifty thousand a year; from the idea of life that is based on what you
+have got; from automobiles, and expensive sports, and boxes at the
+opera; from the notion that it is essential to keep in the swim, and
+know only the right people; from pleasures and from people that waste
+time and money and give nothing back that is worth having.”
+
+“My! Peregrine! When did you turn anarchist?”
+
+“Not long after our engagement was broken. I loved you, Cordelia,
+that’s the truth, and I hated everything that broke it. I learned to
+see that there was no obstacle between you and me that a little time
+and hard work could not easily overcome, and that the obstacles that
+looked biggest and blackest had no real substance to them, and could be
+brushed aside whenever we were ready and had the grit to do it. Don’t
+cry, Cordelia! If you let me hold your hand again, I don’t think any
+one would notice.”
+
+“I was--I wasn’t crying, Peregrine. I--I was--only thinking!”
+
+“Don’t cry! Because this is such a delightful world for folks who are
+free and can work, and have the courage to shape their own courses. It
+looks all lovely colors to me, with you here--so much to get and such
+an interesting stunt to get to it; so much to do, and such inspirations
+for the doing of it; such excellent loads to lift at and maybe
+shoulder. Think, Cordelia, think by all means! That is the most fun
+there is, and the most we shall either of us get for some time to come
+if you marry me on sixty dollars a week. Oh dear! There were times when
+I feared you weren’t going to wait! Those were the worst pinches of the
+pull. To get tired and have no heart of refuge to fly to--you know that
+is pretty trying, Cordelia.”
+
+“I know, Peregrine. And to wait with folded hands and not know--it
+tries the faith. A bunch of roses on my birthday, a bunch of roses on
+Christmas morning, not a line with either of them! Oh, Peregrine!”
+
+“There! Nobody saw us but the squirrel! ‘Far out of sight, while
+sorrows still enfold us, lies the fair country where our hearts abide.’
+Do you know that hymn, Cordelia? There were days together when it ran
+in my head. It meant heaven to whoever wrote it, but to me it meant a
+fifty-dollar-a-month flat and you.”
+
+“Don’t cry, Peregrine!”
+
+“I wasn’t crying. But you must allow a man some sentiment. Are you game
+for the flat and sixty dollars a week?”
+
+“Let us look at the flat. I hope all the rooms are not cupboards. Do
+you know that my aunt just passed on the drive in a victoria? Gracious!
+I have just time to get home before dark and dinner.”
+
+That was the substance of the discourse we had that autumn day. I never
+mailed that letter I wrote to Cordelia’s father. We concluded that it
+would not be polite to our parents to elope, and, since we both had
+very indulgent parents, what was the use! So I broke it to the old
+man, and he was quite reasonable and let me stay to dinner, and we had
+champagne. And Cordelia’s mother was kind, too, and though she declared
+that I was as bad a match as any worldly-wise woman could ask for, she
+felt that Cordelia had come as nearly to years of marital discretion
+as women who get married ever come, and that it was certainly time she
+knew whether I was the ineligible man she wanted or not.
+
+So I told my own parents, too, and my father smiled and said more
+marriages hereabouts seemed to be spoiled nowadays by too much money
+than by too little; and my mother shed some tears, but they were not
+tears of discontent. She has begun to be interested in my trousseau,
+and keeps suggesting things that I had better buy and have charged to
+Father, and I hear of her being seen in the neighborhood of auction
+shops where they sell furniture, and she has counseled me by no means
+to trench upon Great-aunt Susan’s legacy, which constitutes the total
+sum of my private fortune. It is not a large legacy, and how I shall
+ever add anything to it, except Cordelia, I cannot imagine; but I am
+going to somehow, and meanwhile Cordelia will be an immense asset and
+make me a rich man at the start.
+
+Perhaps Aunt Susan’s legacy will start on its career as the total
+fortune of a married man by a period of depletion; for the truth is
+I am not taking in the whole of sixty dollars a week at the present
+juncture. It is no great income to command at twenty-seven if one
+has begun his money-getting at seventeen, but it is a great deal for
+any one of that age who has spent three or four years in general
+enlargement of the ideas and experiences in a college and three or four
+more in learning how to do something that will support life.
+
+I observe that elders are fairly willing to abet the young in getting
+married if only the adventurers are positively enough set on the
+adventure and have the courage of their intentions. The thing that the
+wiser elders won’t do if they can help it is to take responsibility
+about the intending parties being pleased with their bargain. For the
+rest, unless the adventure is _too_ rash or premature, or they have
+violent personal objections, the elders, as far as I see, are apt to be
+complaisant, and even to push along an affair that is clearly at the
+stage where it is safe to push it.
+
+The cards are out for three weeks from next Thursday. It was the first
+our friends in general heard of it, which was as it should be. The flat
+is hired, and yesterday I got my pay raised five a week. Where there’s
+a will there’s a way to break it, the lawyers say, but Cordelia and I
+have passed through that once, and our will is going to probate this
+time.
+
+I am thinking about what we shall talk about, for talk will have to be
+our main reliance for entertainment. There’s a fireplace in the flat,
+and I dare say I shall be seen going home dragging boards and boxes
+after me like the children one sees in the street, for I don’t know
+how we shall afford any wood for that fireplace. Wood, I understand,
+is dear. Never mind; we shall have a fire and sit before it, and talk
+about everything--about votes for women (which I don’t want, though it
+matters little), whether we ought to be abstainers (I’d rather not, but
+it matters little), whether the good English are played out, about the
+future of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, whether it
+isn’t time for the Democrats to shelve Thomas Jefferson and get a new
+prophet, whether Tammany will ever be killed permanently dead and what
+then, whether the People have got any sense, whether legislation has an
+important effect upon divorce, whether the Americans are too much bent
+on substituting legislation for character, and all those things that
+one thinks about.
+
+I wonder if she will be willing to talk about those things! Very likely
+she won’t. It will be more prudent, I think, not to let her see the
+catalogue of them beforehand. Unless brought up to them gently she
+might shy. One talks, I find, to another person a good deal according
+to what is in the other person’s mind.
+
+And for a change we can gossip, and extenuate our neighbor’s faults,
+first agreeing what they are, which always is a pleasant exercise. And
+when somebody makes a good book with real meat in it, well served--if
+any one should--we can read it, and that’s fun, and cheap, and will
+make more talk. And charities are interesting if one goes at them right
+(and cheap as things go), and so are politics.
+
+It is such an interesting world if you get the hang at all of what is
+going on in it, and why, and whither things are tending! I do love to
+see it roll along and to try to puzzle out why things happen as they
+do. It will be fun to talk to Cordelia about all these matters. What
+is there about a woman’s mind--if it is a fairly good one--that it is
+so extraordinarily stimulating to a man’s mind, so that when you’re
+too tired to talk to a man you can chatter on amazingly to a woman,
+provided she’s the right one! They beat drink; they certainly do! They
+are the great natural stimulant and tonic for mankind.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+SOME DETAILS OF LIVING
+
+
+Cordelia and I duly got married (see the newspaper a piece back)
+and are still married, and, speaking for myself and, as far as
+observation enables me, for Cordelia, we are still pleased with our
+audacious experiment. But why should I call it audacious? I am more
+and more impressed, so far, with the calculating prudence of it, and
+surely sensible observers must agree with me, and for ten who will
+think we were rash to get married on sixty dollars a week there will
+be hundreds, certainly, who will smile at the idea of that being a
+doubtful income to marry on.
+
+Our maid, Matilda Finn, is a person of considerable talent. I doubt
+whether two people who aim to subsist on sixty dollars a week
+are entitled to have a maid at all. I dare say they belong in a
+boarding-house, or else in a flat where they do their own work and
+put at least fifty dollars in the bank the first of every month. Oh,
+delightful thought! Imagine being six hundred dollars to the good at
+the end of the year, and putting it into some safe gamble that would
+be the corner-stone of a competence! And if I had only courted Matilda
+Finn instead of Cordelia it would have been so easy! Do you remember
+Andrew Cannybee and his first investment in Pullman? But he was living
+with his mother then and had few expenses. I suppose the money-savers
+are folks who go without everything they want except money until they
+cease to want it. That would have been all right if I had wanted
+Matilda Finn. I know I could have held myself down to self-denial until
+I could really afford to marry, and by that time I should have got
+over wanting Matilda. Whereas I never could endure the thought of not
+wanting Cordelia. I am afraid the Cannybee strain in me isn’t strong
+enough to do any good. I seem to like life while it is here.
+
+All the same I like Matilda, who is part of life at these presents,
+and so does Cordelia. Matilda is cheerful, she is clean and indulgent,
+and she can cook. When food is scarce and dear and you have to have
+it, you don’t want to have it fooled with by the wasteful or the
+inexpert. The little that man wants here below he has to have two or
+three times a day, and it does make a difference how it is fixed up for
+him. Consider the staples of nourishment--bread, toast, tea, coffee,
+bacon, eggs, chickens, chops, beefsteak, fish, codfish, oysters,
+clams, lettuce, rice, beans, milk, and the package foods that some of
+us eat for breakfast to divert our minds from diet! How various are
+the dealings of the human mind and hand with these simple alimentary
+provisions! What grace or defect of human character is there that
+cannot find its demonstration in the way an egg is dropped on toast!
+There is as much difference in toast as there is in people; there is a
+great native difference in eggs, and much individuality; no two slabs
+of bacon are alike to start with, or are affected quite the same by
+smoke and other processes of education. When it comes to coffee, what a
+problem! Leaving out all the coffee that is not coffee at all, consider
+the horde of coffees that _are_ coffee; their propensity to masquerade
+under names that do not belong to them, to be blended, and to taste
+unexpectedly every time you get a new lot!
+
+But give the coffees their due. Nearly all of them are good. It is only
+that some of them are enough better than others to interest an aspiring
+spirit which reaches out instinctively in the direction of the highest
+good for the money. Such a spirit will early recognize that, food being
+variable, the mind that prepares it should be constant and sagacious in
+its processes.
+
+I would not have you suppose I am an epicure. I never think much about
+food unless it is not so good as I think it ought to be, all things
+considered; or else is better than I expected. There needs to be some
+standard of nourishment in a family, and in our family of three it
+has to be adjusted to an expenditure of three dollars a day. Cordelia
+says that I contribute the standard and the dollars and leave her to
+furnish the adjustment. That is where Matilda Finn comes in. I asked
+Mrs. French once if Cordelia could cook--asked her quite casually, and
+not, of course, as though it was of any consequence. She said yes,
+that every woman could cook, and that Cordelia could, of course, and
+that the question was whether any man could live off her cooking. She
+has taken cooking lessons since then and courses in Domestic Science,
+which includes cooking, and I think she can do it. But cooking is an
+agitating job, and I don’t like to have Cordelia agitated. Nor is
+there any need. I like better to have her stick to her own profession,
+which is ministering to happiness. I suppose they don’t teach that in
+the domestic-science courses. Cordelia ministers to Matilda Finn’s
+happiness, and Matilda cooks and does all the other things that need
+to be done in a flat, except what Cordelia and I do; and Cordelia
+ministers to my happiness remarkably. All sorts and conditions of folks
+Cordelia ministers to: she has captivated her mother’s market-man,
+with whom she talks meat, poultry, fish, politics, and current events
+every morning. She knows all his reasons for the high price of meat.
+“That man,” she said the other day, “can bamboozle me into anything!”
+Nevertheless, she seems to be getting intimately acquainted with the
+butcher business and the anatomy of the animals on which we elect to
+subsist, and the comparative cost and edibleness of their various
+sections. The spring lamb that we had for dinner the day Caseby dined
+with us was “a bargain I got off of Mr. Cooper,” who had an oversupply
+of fore quarters and sold one at a great reduction to young Mrs. Jesup.
+As a rule, we do not subsist on spring lamb at home in the spring. That
+seems to be a favorite dinner-party provision, and we still dine out
+enough to keep up our acquaintance with it. The “lamb” we have is the
+most neutral of all meats, unexciting, but sufficient for the purpose
+of nourishment.
+
+Cordelia sings at her work, and that makes me think she must like the
+life. Perhaps I should say her employments rather than her work. Being
+away all day, I don’t know very much about them, but at least I hear
+her singing while she is putting up her hair.
+
+This matter of woman’s work looks important. I wonder what they do
+all day--girls, that is, like Cordelia. If she had a job it would
+simplify matters, particularly if it was a remunerated job, for I dare
+say Cordelia would spend more money if she had it. _I_ could. But it
+would have to be some kind of an independent home job, like painting
+or writing or taking in washing. If she went out to work and had any
+boss but me, it would not be tolerable. Moreover, if she had a job that
+she was qualified for and was worthy of her talents, she would probably
+be better at it than I am at mine and earn more at it than I do, and
+then where would I come in! Think of us both coming home tired from
+wage-earning! Awful! I am glad she has no job except, as I said before,
+the great one of ministering to happiness. I seem to be just a poor
+old-fashioned monopolist, not much farther along than the Stone Age.
+
+But she does keep busy in a way. I hear of her making calls--though
+she says calls are a queer employment for a lady who lives over a
+tailor shop--and she goes to see her mother, and my mother, and various
+girls, and goes to market, and sews a little and reads a little and
+does charities a good deal, and has girls in to lunch and feeds them on
+I don’t know what. She says it’s not wise to break with the life you
+know any more than you have to, and of course that’s so; though neither
+is it wise to hang on to the life you know when you can’t afford it.
+The life you know isn’t the only good one even for you. I have come
+to feel that tremendously since I turned anarchist--to feel that life
+is a big thing, a bully thing, and that we are fools to cramp it and
+trim it down too much to fit usage and environment. Friends are very
+valuable, acquaintance is valuable, a standard of living and a set of
+associations when once you are used to them are very hard to shift
+from; but all those things are the accessories of life rather than life
+itself, and it seems a chicken-hearted sort of prudence that would
+sacrifice life to its accessories.
+
+This from a man who is as sensitive as I am to the differences in
+dropped eggs, and feels as strongly as I do about fish-balls and bacon,
+and who likes caviare when it is really good, and alligator-pears, and
+pâtés of goose-livers, may sound a little forced; but must it follow
+that because one sees and admires the trees he cannot see the forest?
+
+Yes, I am glad Cordelia has no money-making job, but I suppose that
+is no argument against such employments for women in general who need
+them. _I_, being so gifted in money-getting and commanding the income
+I do, did not need to have my labors supplemented in the wage-earning
+line. _My_ need was for assistance in spending our money.
+
+By the way, as I meditate on money and my large appetite for it
+and the ways of getting it, it occurs to me that there is a new
+profession--muck-raking. Maybe it’s not new, since nothing is, but at
+any rate it’s coming along on a good slant just now, is very lively,
+looks altruistic, and I dare say can be made modestly remunerative; for
+muck-rakers, of course, like other working folks, must live. More than
+moderately remunerative it can hardly be without spoiling it, for the
+great business opportunity in it would be to make a great record as a
+prosecutor and then be retained for the defense. To me, as a lawyer,
+that looks good, but there are those who would gibe at it as a sort of
+blackmail.
+
+Well, there does seem to be a lot of tar in money. Sometimes I despair
+of ever getting enough to keep an auto on without having to pay some
+impossibly defiling or enslaving price for it; but I haven’t got to
+have an auto yet, so I take courage.
+
+Father and Father-in-law both growl at the muck-rakers, as is proper
+enough for gentlemen of their years and responsibilities, but the
+muck-rakers look to me like microbes of a very natural and timely kind,
+lawfully and inevitably produced, and going about a necessary business
+with a catching sort of enthusiasm. When they beat a bad grab, the
+anarchist in me insists upon rejoicing, no matter what respect the
+lawyer in me may feel for clients who appreciate lawyers and pay them
+suitably.
+
+Father-in-law has sent me three gallons of superior European champagne
+put up in bottles the usual way, mostly pints. He is a kind man. Why he
+thinks it wise to cultivate expensive thirsts in Cordelia and me I do
+not know, but my theory is that he thinks a taste for beverages that
+we can’t afford will make for abstemiousness. So it will, I dare say.
+Cordelia says the gallons are just a tribute of affection, unsullied
+by ulterior purposes of any sort. We are going to ask Father-in-law to
+dinner, and that is a great tribute, for even reduced to his simplest
+needs he is expensive to feed.
+
+Naturalists have observed and recorded a tendency in married people to
+duplication. That is, in some respects, a solemn thought. I understand
+you can get lots more room in Brooklyn for the same money, and people
+do it; but to me that’s a much more solemn thought than the other
+one--too solemn altogether. Up the island there are extraordinary rows
+and successions of human hives. Cordelia and I catch a Sunday afternoon
+automobile ride up there once in a while and marvel at them as we
+pass. One could get a fine detachment up there; though for that matter
+there is an interesting grade of detachment to be had in Brooklyn.
+And detachment has its value--breaks habits, brings folks in some
+ways harder up against the facts of life, invites a new inspection of
+people, brings various releases and stimulations--but I don’t know that
+it is a thing that Cordelia and I are disposed to chase very hard for
+its own sake. We are hard enough up against the facts of life as it
+is, and we are gregarious people and like companions, and if we got a
+good detachment would go right to work, I suppose, to mitigate it by
+new associations. We will never move to Harlem or beyond merely for
+the sake of pioneering, nor swap associations for the mere benefit of
+swapping. And yet that’s what the Methodist ministers used to do under
+the old three-years-in-a-place rule--may be doing it still. It was
+the intention that they should gather no moss, so the plan was to keep
+them rolling. To me, now, moss looks very nice, and I wouldn’t mind
+its adhering. I love old associations and permanence of relation, and
+my heart is even hospitable to some fixity of condition; but there
+is plenty to be said in favor of wearing the garments of life loose
+enough to shed them when they get seriously in the way. One should be
+enough of a change artist to quit a part he cannot excel in before the
+scene-shifters shut him out. The predicament of people who haven’t
+it in them to prosper in the social level they find themselves in,
+and who are so fettered by the conventions and expectations of that
+level that they can’t break into another, is very pathetic. We hear
+plenty about the tragedies of families that sink, but what of the
+tragedies of those that rise, as when a man makes a raft of money and
+his sons experiment with leisure, drink, chorus-girls, and divorce;
+and his daughter, for lack of inviting marital opportunities, is
+obliged to elope with the chauffeur! That sounds better than eloping
+with the coachman, as used to happen; but still there is a prejudice
+against it. Of course advantages--most of them--are advantageous, else
+civilization wouldn’t get ahead; but, by George! they have their price.
+If Cordelia and I were a grain less stylish we might be living in a
+model tenement and saving money. (I wonder if we could get one that
+would hold Matilda too!) The residents of New York around here where
+we live are roughly divided into two classes, people who eat in the
+front basement and are getting rich, and people who are too stylish to
+eat in the front basement, and have upstairs dining-rooms and butler’s
+pantries, and are (some of them) getting poor. The receipt for getting
+rich in this neighborhood is--Eat in the basement! But I’m not sure
+that it is a reliable receipt. It tends to blight some opportunities.
+Anyhow, it does not fit the ambitions of the socially ambitious of this
+generation, to whom eating in the basement would seem to conflict with
+about all that is delectable in life. Of course basement dining-rooms
+belong to the habits of forty years ago, and invited the simple life,
+which now for the most part has been chased into flats. But the truth
+remains that advantages are bought with a price.
+
+It is harder to get something for nothing than we think it is when we
+read of wills going to probate. They do go there, and then it is to
+observe whether the heirs get the money or the money gets the heirs. We
+don’t take medicine unless we are sick. Money in large chunks is pretty
+strong medicine, but we take it when it offers without regard to our
+condition, and it does not always do us good.
+
+Tom Merchant was saying something the other day to the effect that a
+man could not be of very considerable use in the world until he ceased
+to be dependent on his work for his living. Of course that is not so,
+as Lincoln’s case and innumerable others attest, and as new cases keep
+attesting every day. Nevertheless, the venerable John Bigelow has said
+something very like what Tom said, and I think there is a slice of
+truth in it. Money in store is power, and makes for leisure to think
+and act, and may help enormously, in a crisis, to independence in
+thought and action. Lincoln was poor, but, after all, he had enough
+cash in hand to spare the time for the debate with Douglas and for all
+the politics that followed, up to the time when he began to draw a
+salary as President.
+
+The trouble with the chaps that come early into ready-made money is
+that so few of them ever learn enough about common human life, and
+people, and the elements of the job, to be considerably useful, even
+if they aspire to be. Still, I think they do better nowadays than they
+used to. The money-getting school, whatever course you take, is an
+exacting school. Somehow you have to deliver the goods--some kind of
+goods that somebody is willing to pay for. I wonder how much the girls
+miss, those of them who do miss it, by not taking the courses in that
+school! Of course, they miss some great possibilities of development,
+but against that you have to measure what they would miss by not being
+able to do two kinds of things in the same years, and sacrificing what
+they get as it is, for what they might get as it might be. There comes
+in the division of work between men and women and the difference in
+their natural careers. Cordelia as she is, for me.
+
+Cordelia and I are agreed that we will have rhododendrons in our
+garden. Those in the Park have begun to bloom, and I am excessively
+pleased with them. They have such a fine Greek name that takes me
+back to Xenophon’s Anabasis, and such splendid blossoms and such
+interesting shades of color, and then they bloom in the shade. I
+respect them most of all for that. To live in the shade and turn
+out so splendid--well, allegorically speaking, it happens more or
+less to folks, too. It will cost us something to have a good lot of
+rhododendrons in our garden, but when it comes to planning for our
+country place we never spare expense. Why should we? Frugality of
+imagination is no saving to anybody. Cordelia is less extravagant in
+that particular than I am, because when I see the men who earn a lot
+of money I speculate in my mind as to how they do it and whether _I_
+could do it, and I usually decide that I shall be able to presently if
+I have time, and then, naturally, I think what I shall have when I get
+all that money, and just now it is rhododendrons because they are just
+coming along. A good deal goes with rhododendrons: hired men, domestic
+animals, chariots of locomotion; I dare say by the time Cordelia and
+I get around to have them aeroplanes will have become a reasonable
+solicitation. But there’s no hurry. The rhododendrons in the Park are
+lovely, and I dare say there are more in the Bronx (if you can get
+there), and we have hospitable friends who have them in gardens.
+
+This observing the money-getters and noticing how they do it, and
+computing how long it will take to learn the trick and acquire the
+necessary prestige, is all right enough and even useful, but it plagues
+me when I get my mind too much on it. That’s not really the way to
+live--and yet, and yet. “The life is more than meat; the body more than
+raiment,” but, having life, meat comes very handy, and having a body,
+raiment is convenient. The people who miss it are those who starve
+life, or overlook it, in their solicitude for meat and motors.
+
+The prevalent habit of going to Europe is curious. For that matter the
+habits of contemporary Americans are very curious--the motor-car habit
+so conspicuous just now, their travel habit, much cultivated by farmers
+in winter and by city people in summer. They are remarkable habits;
+instructive, no doubt; expensive, but somehow at present there is money
+for them. Cordelia says she has traveled, and need not go on the road
+again for some time. I haven’t, but I am content to wait until it is
+convenient. This town of New York is trying to live in in some ways,
+but it can be said for it that here a great many things are brought to
+the door. There are pictures here, and very pleasing objects in the
+shop windows, and a variety of people, and spoken languages enough
+to satisfy the most ambitious, and a mighty interesting assortment
+of architecture, and more making while you wait. Some Americans in
+time past have been to Europe to good purpose--as witness our newer
+architecture--and some keep going there to pretty good purpose every
+year. That makes it the easier to stay at home and say _Cœlum non
+animum_ to oneself, and grub along. Cordelia and I bestow some of our
+spare attention on the growth of characters. They don’t seem to grow
+so very much on the road. Intelligence and powers of comparison may
+get a boost in the school of itineracy, but character not so probably.
+Corlear Van Terminal has been to Europe once or twice every year since
+I can remember, and gads constantly when at home, and all but sleeps in
+a motor-car, and yet, so far as I can see, he’s always just the same as
+he was the last time. I can’t see that he’s got ahead one lap. Chapman
+says the soul of man requires to be fed on the Bible and the Greek
+poets. One can do that at home, and one can work at home, and have
+faith and endure and plug along--all quite useful to character, and as
+developing in some ways as travel and Europe can be in others.
+
+Cordelia and I have been reading about the Wesleys and the characters
+they got and how they got them. There were eighteen children or
+thereabouts, and a dozen or so grew up. Fine people, too; admirable
+stock and developed by discipline, privation, and pious training, all
+tempered by affection, humor, and lots of quality in the trainers. It
+makes you feel that character is a very expensive product, and hardly
+to be had at the ten-cent store where we and our contemporaries are
+prone to go for it.
+
+The Wesleys were poor; very much poorer than is thought at all suitable
+in these times, even for the reverend clergy or for the teachers
+of our youth. The father was a clergyman; the mother was a lady of
+excellent abilities and education, and they lived in the seventeenth
+and eighteenth centuries. Food was plain and hard to get in that
+family, and raiment was only slightly related to embellishment, and
+sickness was frequent and poverty perpetual; but with what audacity
+those Wesleys took hold on life! It makes our timid overtures look
+like mill-pond voyaging. Really it is wholesome to sit by the window,
+within ear-shot of the rattle of the street-cars and the chug-chug of
+the automobiles, and read of the past straits of the straitened and the
+courage of the bold, and observe on what shoulders of men and women,
+and through what bogs of privation, civilization has come along.
+
+Not that the Wesleys had a preference for privation. The Reverend
+Samuel scrambled actively to maintain his family, but the increasing
+family outran his best diligence. We have changed all that. Families
+are less apt to outrun the paternal diligence in these days. So far as
+numbers go, they trudge along respectfully behind the census man and
+look over his shoulder at the figures. But that change is all in the
+day’s work, and springs out of changed conditions. People in our time
+are not curious enough about the processes of nature to raise very
+large families in order that they may watch near at hand the workings
+of the rule about the survival of the fittest. What they can observe
+of the application of that rule in written biography and among the
+neighbors seems to suffice, and in their own personal speculation they
+seem to care for no more progeny than they think they can contrive
+survival for, whether they are fittest or not. So butts in man, and
+tries to adjust the processes of nature to match his judgment and his
+taste in expenditure.
+
+When it gets hot Cordelia will be going off to her father’s country
+palace in Connecticut, varying that experience in due time by a sojourn
+in my father’s country palace in New Jersey, and I shall spend with
+her so much of the time as my urban duties permit. That will save
+us from dependence on any fresh-air funds this year. Parents are a
+considerable convenience, especially nowadays, when so many of them
+have learned their place, and especially in this town of New York,
+where it costs all you can earn to provide a winter habitation, and
+where the young wives of earnest workers like me are apt to be a good
+deal out of a job in summer. Much more systematic provision is made
+to carry my kind of man through the summer than for Cordelia’s kind
+of woman--the clubs, for example. For man and wife at our stage of
+life parents, duly qualified and equipped, are a very suitable and
+timely provision. Indeed, I feel sometimes that the worthlessness and
+miscellaneous degeneracy of parents in these times is exaggerated. I
+don’t say this by way of casting an anchor to the windward, nor out
+of mere magnanimity, but because I honestly think so. People say that
+parental authority is all gone. Some think it good riddance; others
+lament. Since democracy came to be the fashion everybody wants his own
+way more than formerly, and gets it rather more, children included. But
+parental direction is still a factor in life, and parental influence
+is enormous, and influence gets to the springs of action and character
+even more effectually than dogmatic authority. It is much harder
+for a fool father to blight a Mirabeau nowadays, and those Wesley
+parents that I spoke of might in our time have meddled less with their
+daughters’ marriages, thereby, possibly, avoiding some disasters; for
+the Wesley girls chose ill, but their parents, in choosing for them,
+chose still worse. Parents doubtless realize the limitations of their
+calling better than they did, and a good deal more is done in these
+days than formerly to piece out their deficiencies and help them with
+their duties. Doctors give them better advice than the Wesley parents
+got; schools in this country--in spite of the constant stream of
+criticism and deprecation which schools endure--average surely a great
+deal better than schools did fifty years ago. The raising and training
+of the young, being as important a matter as there is in sight, has had
+protracted attention from some of the best minds, and has had money
+showered on it in a huge profusion. All that has been more or less
+helpful to parents, but it does not warrant the idea, so popular among
+current commentators, that parents have come to be supernumeraries on
+the public stage. That is a ridiculous notion, the absurdity of which
+would be demonstrated in about half a day if parents universally should
+quit work and take a half-holiday.
+
+We ought to save a little money this summer living on our fathers. It
+is a grand way to save. I don’t know of a better. It makes frugality
+possible without self-denial--at least without privation. They say
+there is excellent sport to be got out of self-denial, and I read that
+saving money and the repression of the impulse to spend it make like
+everything for the development of character. I dare say that is so.
+It is all a part of self-control, and of government by intelligence
+instead of by impulse. And self-control, including timely and suitable
+repression of expenditure, means freedom, and power to give, and
+the power to do, and the power to jump in and seize an opportunity.
+Possibly I can acquire the accomplishment of not buying some things
+that I want, even though I have the money to pay for them. That will be
+a wonderful acquisition to me, though I have got so far as to be mighty
+particular about what I buy on credit. One has got to get as far as
+that if he is going to get married on such an income as ours.
+
+That was a great stroke--getting married. I don’t see how I had the
+nerve to do it. Probably I hadn’t. I dare say we got married on
+Cordelia’s nerve, for when you come down to the facts it was she who
+took most of the chances, and really made the choice. To choose and to
+decide things seem in our day to be very largely women’s work. I am
+more and more impressed with that as I go more and more to Cordelia
+to get her views. I get them on pretty much everything except points
+of law. I am the specialist on that and on the earning of money, but
+she is the specialist on the arrangement of life. I guess she is an
+obedient wife, but in practice I seem to make suggestions and she to
+make decisions. She makes them with great consideration and indulgence
+for me, and with a degree of judgment that saves me much mental effort.
+The opportunities of mental effort that I enjoy below Canal Street,
+between ten o’clock and six, suffice to keep my mind exercised, and
+I am no glutton about making unnecessary mental efforts after I get
+uptown. Perhaps that simplifies life for Cordelia. I wonder what women
+do whose husbands don’t have to work!
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT
+
+
+We have been out to Orange County to spend a week-end with the
+Peytons. They are about our age, but differ from us in condition in
+that they have adequate means of support. Archie Peyton got them by
+inheritance, and they are very ample and enable Archie and Eleanor to
+have all the desirable things and do everything they want to. They try
+conscientiously to live up to their opportunities, making pretty hard
+work of it, but that’s natural, for it _is_ hard work. They went abroad
+in the summer, and now they are providing country lodging and food and
+sport for their available friends. This sport is golf and tennis and
+road exercises, relieved by dabs of riding after hounds, for the Orange
+County Hunt meets out in their country. Eleanor says it’s nice, except
+that they have to invite too many people who have had too much to eat
+and are trying to get thin, whereas it would be more satisfactory to
+be inviting people who have had too little to eat and were trying to
+get fat.
+
+That’s not why they asked us, for we had been living on our parents all
+summer and were quite plump. They have got motor-cars, horses, butlers,
+valets, chrysanthemums, greenhouses, and all the apparatus of pride.
+For us on sixty dollars a week it is rather expensive even to nibble
+at it. We can’t do it often, but we saved money living on our parents,
+and the fall is a grand season, and to fill one’s lungs with the air
+of it and one’s vision with autumn colors is worth some fiscal strain,
+and it always does me good, too, spiritually even more than physically,
+to get over a little easy country on a horse. Besides, Archie is my
+client, and that’s important. I have discovered that one of the great
+secrets of prosperity and advancement in this world, especially in the
+profession that I affect, is to have one’s coevals grow up and prosper
+and have business, especially law business, that somebody must be paid
+to do. When people have these opportunities of lawful gain to bestow
+they seem to like to bestow them on habitual friends, provided that
+they have any and can persuade themselves that they are competent. A
+great deal of opportunity goes by association--is bound to.
+
+To be honest, I did not make all these discoveries solely on my own
+hook. Though they are simple enough. Major Brace expounded some of them
+to me after dinner. He gave me great encouragement in the effort to
+exist. Promotion, he said, cometh neither from the East nor the West,
+but from the cemetery, so it was almost sure to come to any one that
+could hold out; and in the long run a man who was sober, competent and
+diligent, and intelligent about his associations couldn’t very well
+miss it. There were so many advantageous jobs to distribute and each
+generation had them in turn, as the world and what is in it came to be
+its property. Moreover, as things go now and with us, each generation
+has a lot more things and opportunities and good employments than the
+generation that preceded it, not only absolutely, but _per capita_,
+because the increase of wealth and business is outrunning the increase
+of population. It wasn’t a scramble, the Major insisted, for a share in
+a limited quantity of goods, but for an unlimited quantity, and the
+harder the scramble the more there was to distribute.
+
+All that came out of a discussion whether we should restrict our wants
+or try to satisfy them. Try to satisfy them, the Major said. Effort
+in that direction enriches and develops civilization. It tends to
+increase the supply of commodities. It is not the satisfied people,
+nor the people who are content to go without, that make civilization
+go forward, but the unsatisfied ones, who want a lot of things they
+have not got, and get out and go after them and build railroads and
+factories and improve agriculture and invent machinery and multiply
+automobiles and take an interest in aeroplanes and try to accumulate
+money and keep it employed.
+
+“Are you doing all those things, Major?” said I.
+
+“Me? Oh no! I belong to the police. My job is to help to keep order
+and protect property. I never had one of the large-sized appetites
+for commodities--just food, clothes, shelter, money in the bank, and
+something to give away, and protection against rainy days, and enough
+to keep my wife and children off the Charity Organization when I get
+run over by a motor-car--that’s all I want. You see, I’m a lazy man and
+like to read the newspaper and invite my soul, and everything I can’t
+get by working five or six hours a day I go without. Don’t take me for
+a pattern. I haven’t got the progress of civilization really at heart.”
+
+“The express-drivers help it on, I suppose, Major, when they strike for
+more pay?” They were striking at that time.
+
+“No doubt. All that should help distribution, provided the funds they
+are all striking to share exist in sufficient quantity. Distribution
+is next in importance to production. You’ve got to have something to
+distribute, and strikes are not immediately helpful to production, as
+you may have noticed, but the organization of labor ought to be helpful
+to distribution. Only nowadays when an important strike is won the
+cost of it is immediately shifted onto the general public by a gentle
+elevation of prices.”
+
+The Major is a lawyer and practises considerably as a trustee, and is
+doubtless more concerned with the philosophy of business than if his
+energies were enlisted in selling goods and wresting a profit out of
+it. “Mankind can be eased considerably in this earthly competition,”
+he went on, “by great increases of production, great extensions of
+agriculture and manufacturing and transportation, and great economies
+in all of them, provided that distribution fairly keeps pace with
+production.” It comes nearer to doing so, he thought, than all the
+exhorters and socialist people admit, because products have to find a
+market; but when it comes to that, this is a fairly roomy world, with
+many mouths and backs in it, and transportation is cheap and markets
+are world-wide, and goods as yet don’t necessarily pile up on any of us
+because there are a lot of them produced.
+
+And so the Major argued in effect that one way to help bring on
+the millennium was to increase the production and distribution of
+commodities. I suppose that _is_ one way. There must be some connection
+between the millennium and civilization. The millennium isn’t going to
+swoop down on a world that has no meat in the house and where half the
+people live in trees. It is true that it was not a lack of commodities
+that drove Eve to eat the apple and brought on working for a living,
+and most of us realize that man cannot live by bread alone, and that
+with binsful of commodities on every corner free for the taking the
+world would not be saved nor the folks in it satisfied and happy. What
+an interesting simplification of wants would happen in that case, and
+how quickly people would come to ascertain what they really needed and
+refuse to be loaded up with anything else! Still, there is a connection
+between human progress and wants and the commodities that appease them.
+A missionary’s daughter told me once about her father’s experience
+with the South-African blacks. Now and then he would make a convert,
+and always, if it was a thorough job, the convert would begin to reach
+out after civilization--some clothes, a bigger dwelling--presently,
+I dare say, a top-hat. It wasn’t all mere acquisitiveness, either,
+for some of the incidents of conversion were inconvenient, especially
+the troublesome domestic readjustment called for by the theory of the
+sufficiency of one wife. Of course, the millennium may swoop down and
+find us running about in skins or less, and living on roots, but I bet
+it won’t. It is much more likely to be welcomed by flocks of aeroplanes
+to an enormously productive earth, worked for all it is worth by
+people intelligent enough to have abolished poverty and solved the
+problem of distribution.
+
+What does man want here below, anyway? Room and bath, food, clothes, a
+newspaper, and a job and fair opportunities to better himself. He has
+got the newspaper already. In this country, at least, there are enough
+newspapers to go around, and in the cities any one who declines to buy
+one can supply himself out of the first ash barrel. There is nothing
+so cheap as newspapers, and that is a consequence of the pressure of
+commodities on the market. The advertiser pays all but a cent’s worth
+of the cost of the newspaper, and would gladly pay that, no doubt, but
+for the fear of arousing the reader’s suspicions. How much this has to
+do with the fact that I hear of likely young men who come out of the
+nurseries of learning and look wistfully at the newspapers and fail to
+see attractive jobs on them and go away and do something else, I don’t
+know. It may be that likely young men never did troop in large swarms
+into newspapering. Banking usually looks better to them, because men
+get rich at it, and law because a knowledge of it is no hindrance in
+any calling.
+
+The supply of rooms and baths is not so nearly equal to human needs
+as the supply of newspapers, but it is gaining on the population. Out
+there at the Peytons’ house, for example, it has caught up. In all the
+newer country houses hereabouts the great architectural feature is
+room and bath. In a Long Island house just completed that I inspected
+last spring before the family moved in there were between twenty and
+twenty-five bathrooms. There were three in the family, with a liability
+to guests if the owner’s wife ever succeeded in getting rested. I
+thought this marked a considerable forward stride in civilization.
+Church unity still hangs back a bit, but we are getting pretty strong
+on plumbing, and the millennium may find us with a bath apiece.
+
+The Peytons hadn’t so many bathrooms, because their house was not so
+large as the Long Island house, and they had to save part of it for
+clothed appearances; but they had many, and Cordelia and I admired
+them very much. Living in a six-hundred-dollar New York flat makes
+marvelously for the appreciation of space, light, air, and running
+water. Of course the Peytons’ country house had all these blessings,
+and, besides, was delightfully fresh and clean and embellished with
+very pleasing adornments. “No doubt, Cordelia,” said I, “you might
+have had a set of things like this if you had shown a little timely
+judgment.” “Possibly;” said Cordelia; “this is a nice set, too. How
+many bathrooms shall _we_ need, Peregrine?”
+
+“One--two--four--six; six will do us, I think, with a little management
+and a few extra sets of bath-robes and slippers. We don’t want to keep
+a plumber. To have more than a dozen makes a home too much like a
+hotel.”
+
+But there are a number of things that we shall want before we have
+even one house with even six bathrooms in it. I do not greatly
+covet a superfluity of bathrooms, though enough of them is one of
+the great luxuries of our time. Hot water is one of the leading
+valuables of life--one of the things that help to reconcile humanity
+to civilization and to offset its interference with such privileges
+as living out-of-doors and not having newspapers. That has long been
+appreciated. I believe the Greeks liked hot water and made provision to
+have it. Certainly the Romans liked it and went in strong for baths.
+The English have liked it and had it in fair quantity, along with daily
+deluges of cold water. We Americans delight in it and have more of it
+already, I suppose, than any people ever had before, and our supply
+is constantly increasing and constantly spreading from the cities to
+the country. It is cheap, as things go, and there is fair prospect
+that there will eventually be enough to go around. To have a universal
+supply of hot water and newspapers and a long start toward a universal
+supply of what we call education is doing not so ill as things go. I
+can wait for the six bathrooms, or even three. We have one now. One is
+a great blessing. I suppose it is our egotism that makes us more or
+less indifferent to what is not ours and cannot be for the present.
+What most of us want is the next thing--the thing almost within our
+reach. We don’t think about the things that are altogether beyond the
+scope of our fortunes. We do not covet them, nor are we jealous of our
+neighbors who have them, unless we conclude that we have too little
+because they have too much. If the competition seems to us fair, we
+rather like to see prizes go to those who can win them, for a life with
+prizes in it for winners, even material prizes, looks richer and more
+attractive to most of us than a life planned on the principle of a
+division of the gate money among all who come in.
+
+Do you notice how strong the propensity is among all the fairly
+comfortable people to consider their own condition and their own
+standards as normal and truly desirable, and those of other folks,
+whether they have more or less, as a little off? I think that
+propensity is a wonderful provision for human happiness. We value, as
+a rule, what seems the best thing obtainable for ourselves. Whether it
+is abundance or a stimulating degree of privation, we incline to think
+it is a good thing for us and a better thing than other people have who
+have something different.
+
+“Cordelia,” said I, while we were talking about the bathroom, “you
+might have got a better set of things with some other man, but he
+would not have the experience or the discipline that I shall have by
+the time I have acquired the set of things that you ought eventually
+to get with _me_.” There you are! We think we’re better off than the
+Peytons because we haven’t got so much as they have, and better off
+than the Goves because we’ve got more (mostly prospective) than they
+have. _We_ are the standard. We laugh at ourselves, but surely it’s a
+fine thing to have so strong a bent toward toleration of things as they
+are, and expectation of being pleased with them as they’re going to be.
+I suppose it is just a different form of this same self-satisfaction
+that makes the teetotalers want to vote away everybody’s grog, and
+the college authorities insist that all the boys shall want to be
+high scholars like themselves, and the appeased women deprecate the
+agitations of the unappeased for woman’s suffrage.
+
+Probably Cordelia and I are exceptionally resigned to our condition;
+more so than the average of mankind. Yes, I suspect that is so, but
+I suspect also that it is only a provisional resignation. We reached
+out and got the next thing--each other. That was highly satisfactory
+and a good deal better than if we had waited for something else.
+But this reaching out for the next thing seems to be a continuing
+process, and I suspect it has to go on till stopping-time, and that
+satisfaction in life is pretty closely geared to the ability to
+maintain it effectively. That is not altogether a soothing reflection,
+but I don’t know that it is desirable that all reflections should be
+soothing. A fair proportion of them ought to be stimulating. I observe
+that I read the writings of the efficient when my energies are high,
+and when they are low find solace in those of the lazy--only they must
+not be too lazy to write. Some of the very best writers were lazy, and
+struggled with it. Maybe it’s hard work to be a writer, but then it’s
+hard work to be _much_ of anything. But that’s nothing! Nobody wastes
+sympathy, or ought to, on hard workers, provided they get in fair
+measure what they go out after. And one of the greatest things they get
+is increased ability to work hard. This is not entirely my discovery.
+It was suggested by an aged friend, but as far as I have experimented
+with it I think it is so. Of course, the suggestion was accompanied
+by a reminder in quotation-marks that life would be endurable except
+for its pleasures, but that’s not to be accepted too confidently. It
+depends on the pleasures and whether they please or not. There are
+a lot of things that are labeled “pleasure,” and most of them are
+price-marked in more or less forbidding figures, but the considerable
+satisfactions of life seem to be conditions of the mind which may
+be related to living conditions that cost money, but which are not
+themselves price-marked in figures that are at all plain. There’s polo,
+a good, lively pleasure and fairly high-priced and consumptive also
+of time, but I judge the main value of active sports of that sort to
+aspiring men is indirect. They contribute to a physical efficiency
+which is useful just so far as it promotes mental efficiency--sanity
+and activity of mind, spontaneity of thought and speech and power. No
+doubt for some men sports are a form of discipline. They train some
+spirits to exertion, and make for energy and supply driving force for
+work, but, dear me, they take a lot of time and tend to consume more
+energy than they furnish. They are fine for boys, soldiers, Englishmen,
+and people with a disposition to grow fat, and an excellent vacation
+employment for some people, but I suspect there is an economic warrant
+for the disposition of the common run of American adults to intrust
+the transaction of their active sports to persons who can give their
+whole time to them, and whose skilful exertions it is restful now and
+then to watch.
+
+I remember my classmate Hollaway saying one day of a group of sporty
+young gentlemen whom we were discussing, “The things that seem to amuse
+them would not give me pleasure.” That was true. Hollaway liked to
+_think_. That was the way he had most of his fun. He was willing to put
+in enough physical exertion to make his machinery run smoothly, and
+liked, as a rule, to do it quickly and have it over, but he got his fun
+out of what went on in his head, and in talk. He practised and enjoyed
+all the mental processes, observation, cogitation, consideration,
+reflection, rumination, imagination, and the rest, with resulting and
+accompanying discourse. Nobody around had more fun than Hollaway.
+Somebody said he had a “happy activity of the soul.” Maybe that is out
+of Emerson. I’ll ask Cordelia, who confesses to some acquaintance with
+Emerson. But, anyhow, the happy activity of the soul is good to have
+and not visibly price-marked nor denied necessarily, like the opera
+and polo, to the impecunious.
+
+Going out to visit the Peytons was an enlivening change, and gave
+us new topics for discourse and reflection, but the best of it was
+to talk about it with Cordelia. I like the tranquillity of being
+married--married, that is, to Cordelia. Visiting the Peytons is a bit
+of embroidery on the fabric of life, but coming home to the flat and
+staying in all the evening and reading as many of the contemporary
+periodicals as I can manage to get hold of and get time to explore, and
+talking to Cordelia--that is the very web of life. I seldom have the
+sense of justification in life so strongly as in these domesticated
+discourses with Cordelia. I have got her to reading the contemporary
+periodicals and the newspapers and keeping some track of what is going
+on in the world. I don’t know what kind of radicals we will turn out to
+be if we keep our minds on that diet. But I get the other point of view
+down-town, where my employment is largely to assist my boss to help
+gentlemen with property to adjust the management of their concerns to
+laws contrived with intent to retard their processes of acquisition.
+It is nip and tuck in these days between the gentlemen who make the
+progressive political periodicals and the gentlemen who control the
+railroads and banks and trusts and their employees, to determine who
+is going to run the country. As things are, the country is run, after
+a fashion. The wheels do turn, and production and distribution are
+accomplished. To be sure, the wheels screech more or less, and the
+production is pretty wasteful compared with what the professional
+economists say it might be, and the stream of distribution runs so
+lumpy that it makes you laugh; but a fair proportion of the Lord’s will
+seems to be done, and hopeful people calculate that the proportion
+is increasing, though you might not always think so to read the
+progressive periodicals. A large part of the happy activity of nature
+consists of the big creatures eating the little ones, but we complain
+awfully about it when we think we see it going on in human society,
+and the law, whose humble but aspiring servant I am, was invented to
+check it. Everything that is invented to check that propensity tends
+to develop an appetite of its own. The law, the church, the walking
+delegate, all have in them the ingredients of voracity, and I dare say
+the same ingredients are latent in the progressive periodicals. Who has
+the brains to govern will govern, and the mere substitution of lean
+masters for fat ones is not necessarily an advantage. I suppose it is
+largely our own consciousness of that that restrains us from taking the
+country away from the interests and giving it to the periodicals; and
+besides, of course, it is harder, because the interests hang on so to
+what is theirs, and the law, which is me, finds so many obstacles to
+detaching them.
+
+Well, practising law all day below Canal Street in the interest
+of the interests, and reading the progressive periodicals all the
+evening--there’s such a raft of them--in the interest of righteousness,
+altruism, and the people, ought to make me a very broad-minded
+person--so broad-minded probably that I shall lose sense of direction
+and fetch up in the driver’s place on a Brooklyn street-car.
+
+And yet probably not, with Cordelia as a partner. I have consulted her
+about going to the Assembly. Not that anybody wants me to go there,
+but it looks interesting. I wish my boss would employ me to go there
+and see that I did not starve. But he couldn’t very well. I would
+be a legislator in the employ of an employee of the interests, and
+all the fun would be gone. Father and Father-in-law might finance me,
+but neither of them is that much of a patriot. If I were employed
+by one of the periodicals there would be less scandal in that, but
+that’s not a practical thought. I dare say that I shall have to make
+considerably more progress in the practice of my profession before I
+can go to Albany, and by that time I shall have become too valuable to
+myself and dependent associates to be spared to go there. After all,
+I got married, and I suppose that is as fatal an indiscretion as a
+person of my attenuated means should permit himself at this stage of
+his endeavors. It is about politics very much as it is about getting
+married--if you wait till you’re ready, you can’t. It seems as if
+everything had to be shot on the wing. We ought to be governed by
+people of independent means. They are the only people who can afford
+the employment. But most people who have independent means have a point
+of view to match, and there you are--it isn’t quite the point of view
+of a large proportion of the governed. Just so contradictory things
+are, and yet, after all, it’s that that makes the game.
+
+My, my! We have been married nearly a year, and have not yet repented.
+Our circumstances improve a little from month to month. Besides The
+Firm’s regular contribution to my maintenance, I pick up odd jobs now
+and then on my own account. Father and Father-in-law take occasional
+chances in the lottery of my accomplishments by sending me bits of
+business, and I pick up other bits from other people. I have even made
+literary compositions, and tried, not always fruitlessly, to sell them.
+That is a good enough game, if one dared give himself to it, but,
+except as compounded with politics, economics, or public service of
+some sort, it leads away from law, so I don’t follow it hard.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+THE BABY
+
+
+Undoubtedly the baby makes a great difference. He fills up the flat,
+for one thing. I foresee that he will turn us out of it. Nevertheless
+he is valuable, and probably worth his space even in New York. His
+name is Samuel French. Cordelia named him after her father. She is
+extremely pleased with him. So is Matilda Finn, so is my mother, so
+is my mother-in-law. Even the trained assistant to nature who was
+here to welcome him seemed very pleased to meet Samuel, and both his
+grandfathers have been around to inspect him, and have approved and
+duly benefacted him. Neither of these aged but still profitable men has
+had a grandchild before, and they seem to like it. As for me, naturally
+I am like to burst with the pride at being associated, however humbly,
+with an achievement so important. Father-in-law is building a new
+room on to his summer palace in Connecticut, with a view, I think, to
+the more convenient entertainment of his new descendant, and I think
+that nothing but consideration for my fiscal incapacity withholds him
+from building Cordelia a country house. By various expedients I have
+swelled our sixty dollars a week to about seventy, which is a grateful
+gain, and appreciable in spite of the demands of the Post-office,
+the public transportation companies, the market-men, and the other
+agencies of depletion, so corroding to the fiscal being; but even--let
+me see, seven times fifty-two weeks--but even $3,640 is not an annual
+income that seems equal to the maintenance of two residences. I guess
+if we are to have a suburban home it must be an all-the-year-round
+home for the present, and father-in-law’s place in Connecticut is not
+just the right place for that. It is some miles from the station, and
+involves maintenance of horsepower of some sort, and of course that
+is unspeakable except as father-in-law provides it. Our lay would be
+a villa about the length of a baseball ground from the station, or,
+better still, something five cents from Wall Street by tunnel or
+trolley, and you catch the car on the next corner.
+
+But think of the crowd on the car!
+
+No, I won’t think of it. It is the common lot hereabouts, and I should
+be able to stand my share of it, which I would not get in full, anyhow,
+because, being a lawyer, I can leave home a little later, and leave
+for home usually a little earlier or later than the great body of the
+workers for a living.
+
+My new responsibility has brought me a variety of new appreciations.
+As a parent I find I have new sentiments about parents, and increased
+esteem and regard for them as pillars that uphold life and direct it.
+Beyond doubt, they are fine for upholding grandchildren. No doubt
+there would be considerably more grandchildren in our world if there
+were more grandparents who recognized their responsibilities and made
+provision, as a matter of course, to meet them. But that does not
+accord with the lively individualism of our generation. Not only are
+we all desirous of independent life, but our parents prefer it for us.
+Accordingly, when we get above the social plane in which independent
+life for man and wife can be maintained for twenty dollars a week,
+marriage is apt to come late. There are immense advantages about that
+social plane in which twenty dollars a week is a complete living, and
+the wife is cook and housemaid, wife, mother, and nurse all in one,
+and the state provides education, and the doctor adjusts his charges
+to your income, and all the man has to look after is food, clothes,
+shelter, and pocket money! I hope the people who are born with a call
+on that phase of existence appreciate their luck. To rise to the
+twenty-dollar-a-week phase must be full of satisfactions, but to drop
+to it is quite another matter. Whatever starting-point is dealt out to
+us, it is from that point that we have to go on, and, whether we like
+it or not, the point at which it behooves us to arrive is measured from
+the point at which we start.
+
+Raising babies must have been very much simplified by the invention of
+the kodak. There is no attitude, expression, sentiment, costume, or
+absence of costume of Samuel that this handy little instrument has not
+perpetuated. And inasmuch as Samuel varies and progresses from hour to
+hour, acquiring personality, weight, and accomplishments, changing in
+his features and developing new resemblances, the click of the kodak
+is almost as frequent in our flat as the whir of the sewing-machine.
+When infants had to run to the photographer’s for every new picture, I
+don’t see how they got their natural rest. You know they sleep about
+eighteen hours a day. One would think that with all that somnolence a
+baby would be no more trouble than a dormouse, but Samuel is almost
+a complete occupation. As an example of woman’s work he qualifies by
+being never done. When he is asleep he is about to waken, and when
+he is awake he is about to sleep, and either way he is either taking
+nourishment or about to take it, or taking a bath, or changing his
+clothes, or acquiring ideas, or taking first lessons in language. Since
+I have known him I sympathize with the woman who thought it just as
+easy to raise six children as one, because one took up all your time,
+and six couldn’t do more.
+
+I never saw Cordelia so much amused with anything, and I admit to
+being, myself, more diverted and entertained than I should have thought
+possible. I had a puppy once that was a delight, so cheerful, so
+prodigal of affectionate welcomes, and so incessant in his activities.
+Mother has got him now. She appropriated him--or he her--and kept him,
+she said, to remind her of me. But Samuel beats the puppy. He does not
+get around as briskly yet as the puppy did, but he has the same delight
+in very simple toys, and a similar liveliness of mind, and a like
+capacity to be pleased. He is quite a lot like that puppy as he was
+when I first got him.
+
+I didn’t need anything to increase my interest in getting home at
+night. Cordelia attended to that. But Samuel has increased it. He is
+awake when I get home, and, though he is usually getting ready to go to
+bed, he always expresses a flattering satisfaction at meeting me again,
+and has interesting details of progress to report, and smiles, and puts
+out arms, and makes inarticulate noises, and sits in my lap, and makes
+an inventory of my accessible properties.
+
+And, of course, there is a great deal to be told about him, including
+the day’s report of what has been said of him by admiring friends, and
+of the visits he has made and received, and, now and then, statistics
+of his weight and progress in intelligence and activity. I think
+Cordelia talks to Matilda Finn and her various visitors about him all
+day, and then to me about him most of the evening. It is surprising
+that so small a carcass should afford so much discourse.
+
+We have entered him at a suitable school, which is perhaps another
+token of the incompleteness of my emancipation. You know that for some
+years past some of the boarding-schools have been so highly esteemed,
+for one reason or another, by unemancipated parents that they have
+coveted the privilege of having their sons go to them, and, to insure
+getting it, have entered their boys’ names at those schools as soon as
+they were born. So I entered Samuel at the school where I went myself.
+If that implied incompleteness of emancipation in me, I don’t care.
+Samuel must have his chance. It is enough for _me_ to be emancipated.
+Emancipation is a personal affair, like conversion, and no one ought to
+try to force his emancipation on any one else, least of all a parent
+on a child. Samuel may prefer the old order, and by the time he grows
+up we may have the wherewithal to enable him to experiment with it if
+there is any of it left. I don’t know that there will be, and, to be
+sure, when did life offer a bigger or more uncertain speculation than
+this that Samuel yawns and gapes in the face of? Perhaps I ought not to
+call it uncertain, except as to times and means and details, but that’s
+enough; and as to those the uncertainty is ample. The great task that
+is doing now seems to be the improvement of the common lot. No doubt
+that is always going on when civilization is in its forward moods, but
+nowadays there is uncommon urgency about it, and remarkable command
+and handling of the progressive forces, and apparent enfeeblement of
+the powers of resistance. It is very attractive, very hopeful, but I
+suppose no thoughtful person denies that it is possible to improve the
+common lot so much and so fast as to force society into the hands of a
+receiver. That is one possibility that little Samuel is up against, and
+for that matter so are his parents; for the receivership may come, and
+reorganization after it, before Samuel is old enough to sit into the
+game.
+
+My! my! what will you see, little son? All the women voting, all
+the trades-unions joined under a single head, armies abolished, the
+immediate will of majorities the supreme and only law, detachable
+marriage, detachable judges, detachable constitutions?
+
+You may, you may; and so may your parents, for that matter, and are
+as likely to, perhaps, as you are. But stay with us, none the less.
+There seems always to be good sport in this world for good sports--no
+matter what may be going on. Folks lived, and liked to live, hereabouts
+when the men walked between plow-handles with a rifle across their
+shoulders, and they can stand considerable variations in public habits
+without losing the appetite for life. An unchanging order is bound to
+grow tiresome, always did, always will; though outside of China it is
+hard to find one, and even there the old order is moving now. We must
+try to make a good sport of Samuel; one who will be interested in life
+no matter what, and, when new rules are making, have a say about them.
+
+I don’t see why I hang back so about votes for women. At times I think
+I am not opposed. I think I don’t care. But I read all the opposed
+discourse that has any sense in it with sympathy, and all the _pro_
+discourse in a critical spirit, rejoicing when it seems to me unsound.
+It is true enough that there is no compelling reason why I should want
+votes for women. _My_ proprietors don’t want them. Mother sniffs at
+them. Cordelia is observant, with very much such an instinctive leaning
+toward the _antis_ as I have. Why should I excite myself about “equal
+suffrage” when my ladies like things better as they are? Aren’t mother
+and Cordelia representative women? A great deal more so, I think, than
+most of the suffragists. The mass of women hereabouts don’t seem to
+be concerned about voting. The suffragists in agitating to make them
+concerned seem to be trying to create an artificial want. They go about
+to persuade women that they are oppressed, and are rated politically
+with insane persons, criminals, and aliens.
+
+Now, what is all that? Is it progress, or is it mischief? Is it based
+on a mistaken conception of women’s job, or is it a natural detail of
+the redistribution of powers and privileges that appears to be going
+on? Am I opposed because I am a pig and a stand-patter and an old fogy?
+Are votes worth so much fuss, anyhow, and is it going to make any vital
+difference whether American women have them or not?
+
+I don’t know that it is. The women and the men are so inextricably
+bound together that it is inconceivable that with woman suffrage the
+vote should divide in proportions materially different from what
+happens now. But that’s not a reason for letting suffrage come. I
+do think that at present men and women do not long work together on
+the same level at the same tasks. Where women come in either they
+work under the direction of men or the men go out. The departments
+of life in which they rule--and there are plenty of them--are those
+in which men do not compete. I don’t think they can compete with men
+as voters or as organizers and directors of political government. If
+the suffragists get their votes for women, they will get an enlarged
+electorate controlled by men as now. And why should it be expected that
+the controlling men in that case will be better than they are now? Are
+the mass of women wiser, more honest, and better judges of men than the
+mass of men? I don’t think so. I think men and women are just mates.
+There seems to be a woman to match every man, but different from him,
+and a man to match almost every woman. It is not sensible to compare a
+superior woman with an ordinary or inferior man, and point out that she
+is fitter to vote than he is. Of course she is, but that does not touch
+the real question, which is whether government will be better conducted
+with votes for all women than it is now.
+
+Those agitators talk about the “injustice” of depriving women of the
+ballot. They might as well talk of the injustice of the refusal of
+water to run uphill. There’s no injustice about it. It is nature. If it
+can be bettered, all right. Water will run uphill if there is enough
+pressure behind it. But if injustice has been done woman about her
+vote, it was done when she was born female and not male, and the appeal
+from that lies to the higher court.
+
+Was there any done? Take it by and large, is it a misfortune to born
+a girl and not a boy? That may happen to any of us any time we happen
+to be born. It’s a toss-up. It’s not the slightest credit to us to be
+born male, and certainly it should not be the slightest discredit to us
+to be born female; but according as we are born male or female we are
+born to different duties. If political government is one of the male
+duties, civilization will not get ahead by having men loosen their
+hold on it. For my part I suppose that down in the intricacies of my
+composition I have an instinctive conviction, or hunch, that political
+government is a male attribute, and that out of that comes my objection
+to abdicate, or even dilute, my share of it. Instinctive convictions
+have great weight in these matters, though the surface arguments they
+put out may be inadequate or mistaken, as the anti-suffrage arguments
+are so apt to be. The suffragist expounders demolish them, and think
+that they have accomplished something; but, alas! the demolition of
+puerile arguments leaves the question just where it was, with the pith
+of it still untouched. Still I think the agitation does good, bothering
+people like me, and making us think; asking us, What does belong to
+women, then, if not votes? How else are you going to give them equal
+life? What does justice demand for them if not the suffrage?
+
+If the males since the beginning of time have overestimated their
+importance and erred in regarding themselves as specialists in
+government, then it is only a matter of time when we shall be disabused
+of that error and shaken down into our rightful places. But if
+government--meaning political government rather than domestic--really
+prospers better in the long run in the hands of males, in their hands
+it is likely to stay--the substance of it certainly, however that
+shadow we call a vote may flutter off, and wherever it may alight.
+
+Nothing happens without a cause. If the men are to be abased, doubtless
+it will be for their abundant sins. If they will not work as men
+should, they will lose their jobs. If they will not govern as men
+should, they will be governed. History is a record of the strong races
+subduing the weak, and the wise the foolish, to the end that strength
+and wisdom shall prevail in human affairs. In these days of Monroe
+doctrines and alliances and arbitration treaties those harsh processes
+seem to have been superseded. Is this invasion by women of the province
+of men a new expedient of Nature to preserve the competition that is
+essential to human progress?
+
+We cannot beat Nature. She is obdurate, resourceful, impossible to
+fool, with a trick to meet every trick that is offered her. She seems
+determined that man shall come to something and plays man against
+man to make him better himself, and is probably equal, if occasion
+demands it, to play one half of him against the other. For of course
+that is what woman is--the other half of man. There cannot be a real
+competition between the two halves, for they are inseparably joined
+and have to pull each other along. But for all that, they are distinct
+individuals, and one in a given period may make faster progress than
+the other, with a good deal of disturbance of relations and equities
+and ideas. What man gets, woman gets; what woman gets, man gets. When
+woman gets education, liberty, opportunity, protection, the whole race
+gets those benefits.
+
+Then shall we say that when woman gets the vote the race is that much
+ahead? It may be, but to me it has not been so revealed up to these
+presents. Who gave man strength gave him dominion. If he loses dominion
+it will be because he has either misused his strength or lost it.
+
+Samuel has not lost his. He is truly a great power. As I have said,
+he is almost a complete occupation for his mother, and a profitable,
+satisfying occupation, too. I confess to fears in time past that
+girls of Cordelia’s sort did not have enough to do to bring them their
+proper growth and keep them happy. If they didn’t go to college and
+didn’t marry as soon as they got out of school, they seemed to drift
+into a lot of occupations that looked rather futile, and like a mere
+provision for killing time. They played around, they visited, they
+dabbled in anything that came handy--dances, charities, house-parties,
+art, music, extra improvements for the mind--anything that could be
+cast into a void of time which should have ached, and doubtless did. It
+used to make me sorry for the girls because it seemed so hard for them
+to buckle down to anything remunerative and continuous and really get
+ahead in it. If they did that, they forfeited too many opportunities of
+the leisure class, to which it seems to be intended that the daughters
+of the well-to-do, from nineteen to about twenty-three, shall belong.
+If they went to college, that solved the problem for those years, but
+it came back at them as soon as they came out. If they were satisfied
+with their indefinite employments it was bad, and if they were not it
+was also bad. So I used to feel sorry for the girls because their
+job looked to me so vague, and their employments so fragmentary and
+unpromising.
+
+I dare say I was wrong, and that the girls were working more hours
+at their proper vocation than I had the wit to recognize. I see it
+more clearly now; that there are fruits that ripen best in the sun,
+and should not be hurried in the process; that Cordelia did not
+really waste those years in which she waited for me to get started
+as a wage-earner, but learned in them a kind of patience and useful
+domestication, besides other accomplishments that make her better to
+live with now.
+
+Major Brace has paid us the compliment to look in and inspect Samuel.
+He expressed himself as pleased with him, and was very gratifying in
+the warmth of his congratulations to Cordelia and me. Speaking as
+a father of almost complete experience, he told me of the special
+enthusiasm he felt for a child that had never run up a dentist’s bill.
+Samuel hasn’t. There is little or nothing about him as yet that would
+interest a dentist; but Cordelia, whose forefinger is a good deal in
+his mouth, says there may be any minute.
+
+I must ask mother if that is so. No doubt Cordelia’s enthusiasm is
+liable to mislead her.
+
+I believe Cordelia dislikes to spend money. I find her perpetually
+weighing something that might be had against its price, and deciding
+not to have it. Unless the purchasable object is indispensable or
+very positively desirable--like a kodak to snap at Samuel--the money
+looks better to her. That’s remarkable, isn’t it? People differ in
+temperament as well as in training about that, inheriting tighter or
+looser fists, I suppose, according to the forebear they individually
+trace back to. To me, now, things that I want always look better than
+what money I have. It makes me unhappy to spend _much_ more than I
+have, but I enjoy very much spending what I have got. I never have any
+money ahead, unless you can see savings in life insurance, to which I
+make some inadequate pretense. Maybe that is a defect in my character,
+though accumulation on seventy dollars a week has its reluctances when
+you have a wife and baby and a cook and flat and all that. Still, if
+I had no elders to fall back on I’d have to pinch some salvage out of
+every dollar.
+
+But Cordelia is naturally more retentive than I am. It is remarkable
+how little she cares, relatively, for things. She has a good many
+things, and has always been used to them. She likes them, but with an
+interest that is altogether secondary, preferring power, independence,
+and tranquillity of mind to objects of convenience or embellishment,
+and to almost everything else except health and an easy conscience. She
+has a private fortune--I don’t know that I have mentioned that--not
+large, but yielding sufficient income to buy her clothes. All girls
+ought to have private fortunes. Small ones will do: do better, perhaps,
+than larger ones, for I don’t suppose it is quite ideal to be swamped
+by your wife’s money. Cordelia gets a great deal of comfort out of
+hers, but I see her basis of expenditure is different from mine. Mine
+is adjusted to what I have; hers to what, on due reflection, she would
+rather have than money. On that basis she spends not only her own
+money, but mine. I dare say she will be a rich woman some day, and,
+I hope, still married to me; so there is a chance that, with other
+good luck, I may gather some surplus too. I believe she dislikes to
+shop; indeed, I have heard her say so. There is a streak of Scotch in
+the Frenches, and I dare say it happened her way. My! my! What luck!
+When you think of the women--and men too, but especially women--whose
+highest happiness is to buy things and lug them home, it seems a
+marvelous dispensation that I should have acquired a companion of so
+opposite a sort. To be sure, no girl that was infatuated with the joys
+of purchase would have thought twice of me; and yet, who can tell,
+for I suppose there are girls who have neither self-restraint nor
+self-denial about anything, and are liable to think they must have
+something that really would not suit them at all? I have always thought
+that Rosamond Viney in _Middlemarch_ was the most fatal character in
+literature. What must it be to be money-grubber for a woman like that,
+with an expensive appreciation of the material side of life and no
+conception of the rest of it! Stars above! how much better it is to be
+lucky than wise, especially in youth, when, as Major Brace assures me,
+none of us know anything. There was Solomon, who wrote the Proverbs,
+and Ben Franklin, who wrote Poor Richard; both able to make shrewd
+discourse by the ream, and neither of them fortunate on the domestic
+side. Probably it does not accord with the economy of nature that wise
+men should have wise wives; certainly if there is a scheme of things
+that is worthy of respect, it would not have fitted into it for me to
+have a foolish one.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE
+
+
+I remark the disposition of contemporary American families to regulate
+their church-going by the inclination of the ladies. I suppose it will
+soon happen that Cordelia and I will go to church when Cordelia feels
+it to be desirable, and that when she stays at home it will look more
+profitable to me to stay at home with her. Although that means that we
+will go pretty regularly, it is not quite as it should be, any more
+than that I should go without my dinner when she has a failure of the
+appetite. But it seems apt to be so with contemporary Protestant people
+who get married. Even if the male has a previous habit of church-going,
+and convictions or preferences in favor of it, the woman is apt to
+be captain in that particular, and to assume command of the family
+conscience. That is an item in the contemporary slump of the male in
+the business of directing the course of life. He tries to keep a hand
+of his own on politics, but in the concerns of religion easily falls
+into the practice of looking to the woman to make his decisions and
+remind him of his practices. Which is feeble of him, for, as between
+religion and politics, religion is decidedly the more important, for it
+shapes and inspires and regulates the whole of life, politics included,
+whereas politics is no more than a detail.
+
+When I think of women and their needs and powers and rights, and
+their office in life--as I do a great deal nowadays, with Cordelia to
+observe and those suffragists prodding at the subject all the time--I
+have bursts of momentary conviction to the effect that if women go
+on assimilating four-fifths of the available religion and leaving
+nine-tenths of the alcohol and nearly all the tobacco to the men, they
+will govern our world before we know it. The Turks understand better.
+The male Turks make a specialty of piety, go without rum, and share
+tobacco liberally with their women; so to be a male Turk is still a
+relatively powerful condition, though I understand the Turkish ladies
+are restless nowadays, in spite of sweetmeats and cigarettes, and are
+covetous of education, and suspect that there should be more coming to
+them than they are getting.
+
+Cordelia has intimated that that observation of mine about men having
+strength, and therefore dominion, is something of a bluff. She is too
+polite to contradict it, but not too polite to stir me to further
+reflections about it. Are men stronger? Have they dominion?
+
+There is no doubt that the average man we see about can hit harder
+than the average woman. He can also run faster and make better time
+up a tree, so that he seems to have the best of it, physically, both
+in offense and escape. If you come to translate these powers into
+practical contemporary factors he can usually earn more money at
+present than she can, and is much less vulnerable in the reputation. It
+may be argued that this superiority in male abilities is not the work
+of nature at all, but a consequence of male malignancy and oppression,
+and that if woman had a fair show to get her due development she could
+stand up to man when he put up his hooks, and run him down when he ran
+away. So Olive Schreiner seems to feel about it. Man’s power to make
+more money than woman is challenged as an injustice. Perhaps it is an
+injustice in many cases. Perhaps our industrial system is not adjusted
+yet to women’s undomestic work in schools and factories and offices,
+and maybe the payroll will be revised in time in women’s favor. Still
+I think man’s superior money-making powers are of a piece with his
+power to hit harder and run faster. Money-getting seems to be more in
+the line of his natural job than of hers. He is less distracted from
+it by other leanings than she is. I guess he will always be the head
+money-getter, though very likely her claim on what he gets may come to
+rest even more on a basis of natural right than it does at present.
+It is a very much respected claim as it is, and supported by law and
+sentiment.
+
+Man is superior in some kinds of bodily strength, and apparently in
+some kinds of mental strength, too, but does it give him dominion?
+Some, I think. It seems to give him a good deal of dominion among
+savages, and less and less as civilization increases. Probably it would
+give him more if he were not inferior in some of the kinds of strength,
+and in some other respects that we are not used to classify as
+strength, but which offset it. There are war-powers and peace-powers.
+Admitting, in spite of Kipling’s she-bear poem, that man’s war-powers
+beat woman’s, how about peace-powers? Of course they are enormous. If
+she uses them for offense, she can spoil the man’s cake at any time.
+There is no living without women, and to be assigned to one of them
+and have her contrive that there shall be no living with her makes a
+serious dilemma. I have discussed this matter with our old friend Major
+Brace, and he has illuminated it with such wisdom as his great age (as
+he says) has enabled him to supply. “We can’t do anything, Peregrine,”
+he said, “but try our utmost [of course he really said damnedest] to
+make them happy, and hope that they will be good.” He told me a story
+about a house-painter he once knew in the country who had some ferrets.
+“I noticed when looking at the ferrets,” the Major said, “that he had a
+padlock on the place where he kept them, and he let me know, somehow,
+that he carried the key in his pocket and let nobody but himself
+meddle with them. I took note of that, because it seemed to me that
+the ferrets being part of the domestic establishment, the natural way
+would have been to leave the key in the house when he was away and
+intrust the ferrets to his wife. But that was not his way, and I set
+him down in my mind as a believer in male dominion and an upholder of
+the authority of the head of the house. And, accordingly, when I heard
+about a year later that his wife had eloped with the butcher I wasn’t
+at all surprised. No doubt he had felt about her as he had about the
+ferrets--that she was his property. I heard that he was extremely put
+out when she ran away, and took it so much to heart that he left the
+village. I suppose he didn’t know any better, though of course it
+is possible that the woman was a fool and couldn’t be trusted. Her
+going off with the butcher implies a certain carelessness, though not
+necessarily a lack of intelligence.
+
+“You see, Peregrine, one measure of the liberty of women is the
+intelligence of man. And it works the other way round, too. A man who
+is intelligent enough to prefer a free woman for his companion will
+plan and take thought to have one; and a woman who is clever enough
+to prefer a free man will take thought to keep her man free and still
+keep him. That’s what all decent people do nowadays who are passably
+wise, and I suppose it is what such people have been doing, not
+always, perhaps, but easily since the time of Adam. And I dare say the
+better-grade animals do the like.”
+
+I asked the Major if he thought Kipling was right about the she-bear
+and the superior offensiveness of females. He said he thought there
+was a good deal of meat in Kipling’s verses, and that few intelligent
+men came to be half a century old without having had to take thought
+of the intensity of the female disposition. “Somehow, Peregrine,” said
+he, “they seem to be a little nearer nature than we are. The primitive
+creature seems to survive in them a little more perceptibly than it
+does in us. And it is a very valuable survival--very valuable--and
+fit to receive the most respectful consideration, because, as Kipling
+intimates, it is a factor in the continuation of the race. When a man
+has a wise wife who loves him, as you and I have, Peregrine, it is his
+business to get the benefit of everything she has. All her strength as
+well as his is needed in their common business. If he troubles her
+with his limitations, checks her initiative, and ignores her dissent,
+it is as bad for the common interest as when she does the like to him.
+He should attend to her risings-up and her sittings-down, and when at
+times the primitive creature rises up in her, his best procedure often
+is neither to run nor to try to rule the storm, but to sit down in the
+sand, wrap his burnoose around his head, and keep his face attentively
+to leeward until the gale blows out and calm re-eventuates. Then,
+in due time, she will dig him out again, if necessary, and he will
+have much less to unsay and repent of than if he had talked back. And
+usually, if he has been attentive, he will have learned something that
+it is valuable to know.
+
+“Lord love us,” went on the Major, “I hate subdued wives. I hate
+subdued husbands also, but subdued wives worse, if possible, because
+what subdues a wife is usually such an offensive combination of egotism
+and stupidity. And yet I know quite able men who bully their wives and
+have checked their wives’ development and diminished their abilities by
+doing so. It is a shocking waste, although it is to admire the wives
+who bear it. That is apt to be the best thing they can do, under the
+circumstances. You see, in marriage that suggestion of Scripture about
+cutting off the right hand that offends has only limited application.
+Man or woman of us, when we have stood up in church and acquired a
+right hand of the opposite gender, we have need to go mighty slow about
+casting it from us. To read the divorce statistics, and about the
+growth of that practice in this country in the last twenty years, you’d
+think divorce was on the way to become a universal habit. But I guess
+it won’t. I guess when the ratio has reached a point where it provides
+duly for the irresponsible, intemperate, light-minded, and unfortunate,
+the increase will stop, and maybe, if civilization improves, the
+figures will begin to run the other way. That may seem optimistic, but
+I can’t think that woman’s extraordinary gift for living with man, and
+man’s surprising talent for getting along with woman, are going to
+perish or be wasted.”
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My coevals that I meet are still talking about football; not
+exclusively, of course, but with perseverance and of a lively
+appearance of interest. Talking about it has some obvious advantages
+over playing it, but I never learned to be really expert in either.
+Cordelia and I saved quantities of money last fall staying away from
+football games. Also quite a lot in staying away from the great final
+series in professional baseball. Also time and strength on both of
+these items. If our circumstances had been four or five times as easy
+and Samuel could have spared us, we would have enriched our experience
+of contemporary life by taking in several of these contests. As studies
+in crowdology they are mighty good and leave permanent impressions
+behind them. And they are interesting socially and anthropologically.
+And sometimes they are pretty good as sport--the football games better,
+I think, than before the rules were changed. But as it was, it was a
+very easy economy for us. Cordelia said she had been to football games
+and didn’t believe there were any important new thrills left in them
+for her; and we read a lot about them in the papers and were content,
+though I don’t think football really makes first-class newspaper
+reading. I can’t follow the ball in type even as well as from the
+seats, and I only get the score and the spectacular features. The
+worst of it is I cannot care inordinately who wins. Of course, the
+players do. They ought to. And so should the undergraduates and persons
+just emerged from that condition. But I don’t understand why such
+large masses of adult people contrive to care so much--if they really
+do--whether Harvard beats Yale, or either of them beats Princeton, or
+whether the Army or the Navy wins.
+
+I am getting deplorably careless in my feelings in this great subject.
+To be sure, when there is a big game I want to know how it has gone,
+and buy the latest evening paper and take it home and assimilate, and
+discuss a little, its disclosures about what the score was and why it
+was so. But however it turns out it doesn’t affect my appetite for
+dinner, nor my interest in food, and I can’t talk about it more than
+half an hour. And when the Sunday paper comes with all the details I
+am apt to get interested in other news and skip the football stories
+altogether, or until late at night.
+
+Really, I am ashamed. It comes, no doubt, with increase of years and
+the pressure of responsibilities and concern about the more vital
+details of human existence. Cordelia reviles me and says I am getting
+older than my years. Maybe I am, mentally, though she is just about
+as much interested in football as I am, and no more. I suppose sport
+naturally falls into a secondary place in the thoughts of people
+who have a living to make and rent to pay and a child to raise. If
+everybody was like us, sport might languish, and that would be a pity.
+I’m glad they’re not. The Pharisee was not so far out, perhaps, in
+thanking God he was not like other men. The trouble was, he did not
+go on and thank God that other men were not like him. There needs to
+be great variety in the world if all the jobs are to get attention.
+I’m thankful that the prosperity of football does not depend on me,
+and that I can be bored by it without detriment to the great cause of
+sport, because, I suppose, it really is a great cause, and related to
+the perpetuation of vigor and virility in men.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have been thinking about celibates. There is something to be said for
+persons to whom celibacy comes natural. To most persons it does not
+come natural. It never did to me, for instance. I hate it when it is
+forced, and object with what may be a Protestant detestation to vows
+that bind people to it; but there are marvelously useful people in the
+ranks of the unmarried.
+
+Brookfield, a contemporary whose line is education, has been telling
+me a story about a rich man, named Thompson, who has got interested in
+the improvement of mankind. Somebody said the other day that the men
+who get rich are those who are able to get more out of other people
+than other people get out of them. That is a very plausible definition
+and good as far as it goes, but the story I heard made me realize that
+it doesn’t cover all the ground, and that many rich men are creators
+of wealth. This Thompson that I heard of had extraordinary brains for
+business. He could think to the bottom of propositions, and think out
+all their details and perceive whether they could be made profitable
+and how. He got at business almost as young as Alexander Hamilton, for
+his parents, who were good people, both died when he was fifteen and
+left him, as you might say, with his hat on, going out to look for
+means of support. He went to a big town and got a job with a good
+concern. At the end of three years he was ill, probably from overwork.
+His employer told him to go away and stay two months and get rested.
+He went, and stayed six weeks, and came back with the biggest bunch of
+orders that the firm had ever had. His employer saw then that he was
+incorrigible, and pretty soon he took him into partnership.
+
+Now there comes another likeness to Hamilton. The boy wanted to know
+more, and determined that when he had got money enough he would quit
+work and go off and study. He calculated that he would have a million
+dollars by the time he was twenty-six, and he thought that would do.
+He actually did get his million and something to spare at twenty-six
+(and this is not a newspaper story, either; Brookfield told it to me),
+and actually did pull out and go off to Europe and spent three years
+in France and Germany improving his mind. Now comes in his gift of
+celibacy, in which he was quite different from Hamilton--who never
+had any discernible talent that way--and from me. Instead of getting
+married and raising a family, and having a flower-garden and horses
+and cows--this being before they had invented automobiles--and enjoying
+life, he did not get married at all. I don’t know why not. Maybe he
+didn’t know how and was too old to learn; maybe somebody else persuaded
+the girl that he aspired to persuade. At any rate, he didn’t marry,
+but came home and made lots more money, and finally retired from
+active business and set his wits to see what he could do to make the
+world better. Now he lives on twelve or fifteen thousand a year, and
+spends most of his strength and his surplus income and more or less
+of his principal chiefly on one considerable enterprise that combines
+philanthropy and education. But he is dragged back into business now
+and then, Brookfield told me, when a commercial rescue job offers, that
+looks so difficult that nobody else will touch it.
+
+Of course, celibacy has no particular bearing on Thompson’s usefulness
+except that he was qualified to get along with it, and it left him
+entirely free to spend himself in trying to better the general
+conditions of life. It is not news that there are always some mighty
+useful bachelors about. Still less is it news that there are many
+indispensable spinsters. I suppose the sentiment that everybody must
+get married and have four children has got some open seams in it; but a
+life is the thing that folks like best to leave in the world, and with
+reason, for, on the whole, a life, if it is good enough, lasts the best
+of anything, and leaves the most imperishable effects.
+
+It is too soon yet to say if my son Samuel is going to leave an
+imperishable effect in the world, but he is doing well, and the more
+perishable effects have already been found to be so little suited to
+him that one of his grandmothers has given him a modern rag-doll--an
+elegant creation that comes from a shop--and the other a teddy-bear.
+Teddy-bears are scarcer in the toy shops than they were, because the
+current of politics has rolled on, but they can still be had and may
+yet become more plentiful. Samuel lives a care-free life. In that
+respect he is an example and encouragement to us all. He assumes no
+responsibility about anything, takes his nourishment without turning
+a hair or sweating so much as one bead, and shows indifference to the
+primal curse. It is cheering and strengthening to have such a spirit in
+the family.
+
+Ben Bowling, who came home with me to dinner the other night, has some
+of Samuel’s quality. Ben likes life and does not care what happens. I
+threatened him with universal prohibition and the total disappearance
+of potable grog from Christendom. He said it would never happen so,
+but if it did he didn’t care. He drank too much, anyhow, and if there
+was nothing to drink it would be good for his health and save him lots
+of money. I threatened him with woman suffrage. He refused even to
+object; said checkers was still checkers after all the pieces had got
+into the king-row, and as good a game as ever, though with differences
+of detail. I threatened him with stagnation of all industrial activity
+as the result of enforcing the Sherman law. He didn’t care; said he
+worked too hard, anyway, and needed a rest; could eat very simple food
+at a pinch; was too fat; was threatened with an unsuitable entanglement
+of the affections, and might escape the bag if the times were hard
+enough. Then we all talked about the Sherman law. I see in the papers
+that the consumption of alcoholic drinks in the United States last year
+was the greatest on record. No wonder, when you think how much the
+Sherman law has been talked over: a dry subject on which you get no
+further and sink into despondency unless buoyed up. It is funny to see
+the sagacity of the country flunked, apparently, by that problem. What
+Ben and I agree on is so, and we agreed that the Sherman law, grinding
+out prosecutions and disorganizing business because public opinion
+could not settle on any plan to improve or amend it, was not unlike
+the silver-purchase law that kept loading silver into the Treasury and
+scaring off gold until Cleveland finally got it repealed. We did not
+agree that the Sherman law ought to be repealed, but did agree that it
+might elect the next President. Also that neither party was satisfied
+with any one who was running for nomination, though that is perhaps
+not an unusual condition when nomination is still five or six months
+off. But Ben did not care. He was attentive, interested, and amused,
+but hoped to stay aboard, no matter what the weather was, and help in
+navigation if his services were required. He and Samuel are reassuring.
+
+Another thing I find reassuring is the glimpses I get now and then of
+men who are at work providing government for the country; especially
+unadvertised men whom few people ever hear of, who hold no office
+and aspire to none; whose pictures are never in the papers, nor
+their names in the reporter’s books or the mouths of the multitude.
+I heard the other day about one such person (Brookfield told me), a
+man of sufficient fortune--a million, I dare say--not a celibate like
+Thompson, but married and with a few children; a shrewd, experienced,
+thoughtful man, whose interest in life is and always has been politics,
+to handle the machinery of it and get the best results compatible
+with the material offered to pass laws and fill the offices, and the
+prejudices and mental disabilities of the voters. “I have known that
+man,” Brookfield said, “for eighteen years, and watched him play
+politics all that time; plan and direct; weigh men and choose between
+them; use their talents and abilities when they had them: put them in
+places where they belonged when he could; put in the next-best man
+when he couldn’t. He always played fair; always wanted the best man,
+the best law, and the best principle that he could see, and never
+wanted anything for himself except the fun of playing the game. You
+couldn’t drive him into office. He never tried to make a penny out of
+legislation. The less he was seen and heard of the better he liked
+it, but he recognized politics as the great man’s game, and he liked
+to play it. No doubt the sense of power was pleasant to him, but his
+use of power was entirely conscientious, and the source of his power
+was never money, but the confidence that men had in his sagacity and
+his unselfishness. Back in him somewhere there was, of course, a sense
+of duty and a belief in certain principles of government, and a sort
+of unconscious consecration to the desire to see our experiment in
+government go well and to see the country prosper. But the immediate
+interest that kept his mind busy was just a delight in guiding the
+political affairs of men.”
+
+I dare say Brookfield’s man is an exceptional political boss; but I
+dare say, also, that in so far as we have, or ever have had, or will
+have, decent government, we owe it to somebody who has had a call to
+provide it for us, and has had the talents necessary to make his call
+effective. The rare thing about Brookfield’s man, as he described him,
+was his self-effacement and superiority to vanity. He loved to play
+the game, but not only never thought of the gate money, but never cared
+to be a grandstand player. To do the job and do it well brought him
+the joy of a true artist in his art. As I said, I have felt encouraged
+about the future of politics in this country since I heard about him.
+If he had been a saint I wouldn’t have been so much encouraged, but
+Brookfield represented him as a mere human being, like any of us,
+looking about for things that interested his mind and made life taste
+good, and finding them supremely in politics. It is an encouragement
+to find that our politics is so good a game that folks with money and
+brains enough to experiment with pleasures will play at it purely for
+their inward satisfaction, and without attention even to the applause.
+Of course, men of that temperament and that high degree of sagacity and
+self-control are rare, but we have our share of men with an insight
+into cause and effect, and an understanding of the human mind both in
+the individual and in the crowd, and with ability to hear what is going
+on when they put their ears to the ground, and with a lively interest
+in human affairs that must surely draw them into politics whenever
+they see that politics is a paramount interest. We have no picturesque
+Dukes of Devonshire drudging dutifully at government without vanity
+or political ambition, as fathers drudge for their families, and as
+Washington, maybe, drudged for us, but I believe we have a native
+product of our own that does like work, and quite as often with
+intelligence, because the work calls to them and because they not
+only feel the responsibilities of civilization, but find delight in
+undertaking them.
+
+And why not, to be sure! What else is there in life that is so fruitful
+in recompenses as a cheerful undertaking of the responsibilities of
+civilization? Mine are represented mainly, as yet, by Cordelia and
+Samuel, but I mean to undertake lots more. I see quantities of them
+about waiting to be undertaken. So does Cordelia, who is one of the
+most active and responsible of responsibilities, and, being less tied
+up to wage-earning than I am, gives more attention to putting props
+under civilization.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+POLITICS
+
+
+My calling does not seem nowadays to inspire respect. Folks hoot at
+lawyers, declaring with much reiteration that law has ceased to be a
+profession and become a business. They vary that by pointing out that
+all the best talent in it is bought up day by day by the corporations
+and the rich. Even the judges--look at them! The current disposition
+is, when you don’t like a decision of a court, to take the judge’s
+number and write to the management to have him fired. It is to laugh at
+decisions and the feeling about them. The other day the United States
+Supreme Court decided something thus and so by four to three. Justices
+1, 3, and 5 protested vigorously. Personally I sustained the dissenting
+opinion, and thought the decision left the law in a bad condition.
+That could be cured by Congress, which is perhaps the best way, but
+the popular method would be to dock Justices 2, 4, 6, and 7 a month’s
+pay, and try the case again with a full court. That’s how folks seem to
+feel, and perhaps some of them would act on their feelings.
+
+_Some_ of them! Stars above! What some of us would do is past guessing.
+What some of us are thought capable of doing quite outruns belief,
+but that is because the air is charged with politics and with plans
+and specifications for making over the world, and with a perceptible
+leaning, as I have intimated, toward beginning with the legal
+profession.
+
+Oh, well, let ’em! I’m not afraid. A man who can make a living by
+law can make a living at something else if necessary. It is the
+understanding when they put young fellows to learn the law that they
+will be qualified, more or less, if they learn it, not only to be
+lawyers, but to be bankers, brokers, railroad officers, editors,
+milliners, grocers, contractors, and nurses-general to ailing
+industries, and undertakers. Accordingly they usually appoint lawyers
+to receiverships, and usually the appointees go ahead and bury the
+patient. No doubt it is a natural consequence of this theory that
+lawyers shall know and do everybody’s business that there is this
+prevalence of impressions that everybody ought to be able to beat the
+lawyers at law. Of course there ought to be reciprocity in omniscience.
+Of course the lawyer trade can be overdone, but there’s more to it
+than these recall people think. I guess it will last my time. It’s the
+science of keeping order in the world. I admit that it needs assistance
+from cops and sometimes from soldiers, and cannon and warships, and
+that too much of the time it keeps a sort of crystallized disorder that
+has to be smashed occasionally and rearranged. But when it comes to
+rearrangement, back they come to the lawyers, professors of the science
+of keeping order in the world.
+
+It is interesting how people divide in politics. All the decent people
+seem to be after the same thing, more or less, but differ according to
+knowledge, temperament, circumstances, and affiliations as to methods
+of getting it. And the differences last so wonderfully! There’s free
+trade and protection, or high and low protection--we’ve been discussing
+those matters in this country voluminously and insistently for from
+fifty to a hundred years, and by far the most of us don’t know now
+precisely where we stand. We are, reasonably enough, for as much
+improvement as will do us good, and not for any more than is helpful
+at the price. But tariff-improvement isn’t to be had in quarter-yard
+lengths. Congress makes a rough effort to please customers, and when it
+has finished it is take it or leave it, and the customers usually go
+off grumbling.
+
+And the other things that people want--restraint of corporations,
+restraint of labor-unions, restraint of political bosses, changes in
+the machinery of politics, hand-made government by the people, single
+taxes, income taxes, minimum wages, municipal ownership of public
+utilities, votes for women--my gracious--there’s a new remedy every day.
+
+Not but that many of them are good and some of them timely. The world
+seems to be progressive nowadays, and I suppose its progress is upward,
+and not to the bow-wows. But it is to wonder about every proposed
+change whether it is really improvement or merely change, and about
+every novelty that people clamor for whether their true need is not
+something else--a change in themselves, rather than any practicable
+change in the regulations of life. For one need not be very old to
+observe that different people make out very differently in the same
+circumstances, and that folks affect circumstances much more than
+circumstances affect folks. Yet circumstances do affect folks very
+much, crush them sometimes, and stunt or warp them often; and certainly
+there is an obligation in the folks who have it in them to affect
+circumstances to improve them for the benefit of all hands, and provide
+reasonable access to opportunity.
+
+Do I get in with the cart-tail orators this campaign? Why not, to be
+sure? Politics has been an early crop this year, sprouting hard in
+March, and working overtime ever since, with an enormous profusion of
+discourse and a vast expenditure of time and money in a general public
+effort to get somewhere. But that’s all right. The crop is going to be
+worth the labor. This is really the first time the political school has
+been run wide open since Bryan’s first campaign, and that was sixteen
+years ago, a period that carries me clear back to Eton collars. Alas
+for me! I suppose I’m a sort of conservative. They ought to examine the
+blood and find out where people belong, and save us some of our mental
+struggles to discover it by cerebral analysis. I don’t know what’s in
+my blood, but when people are for scuttling the ship so as to get the
+boats out easier I always seem to be for some other plan. Now and then
+it’s necessary to scuttle. There was the everlasting French Revolution,
+where they blew up their ship, and in the long run made a good thing
+out of it. But that was an exceptionally rotten ship, and they had
+things fixed aboard so that the crew were too successfully separated
+from the grub--a feat that a large share of human ability seems always
+at work to accomplish, and which, when it is successfully pulled off,
+achieves a very penetrating and comprehensive quality of ruin. Perhaps
+it is the conservative molecules in my blood that makes me as much
+adverse to this detachment of the crew from the grub as I am to blowing
+up the ship. No true friend of navigation wants either of them.
+
+I guess it’s more fun to be a meat-ax radical than a conservative.
+The ax-handle is a simple implement, and probably blisters the hands
+less than this eternal pulling on the sheets and throwing the wheel
+over. But we don’t really choose our line in politics. We take the
+steer we get from our inside, and which comes down to us, no doubt,
+from our forebears, along with the tendency to fat or lean, and
+variations in the adherence of hairs to our scalps. I dare say we
+are not as grateful as we should be to other persons whose molecular
+inheritance is different from ours for going their way and following
+their hereditary propensities, so that we can better and more helpfully
+follow ours. If we all got the same steer I dare say the ship would
+run aground. To avoid that there comes this variety of propensity, and
+also the great principle of reaction on inherited inclinations, which
+has always raised up from time to time such valuable and efficient
+revolutionaries. The pinch for the natural conservatives comes at
+times when conservatism has outrun its license and crystallized into a
+do-nothingness which is more dangerous than radicalism. Then the real
+conservatives like me, who always want to let things down easy, have to
+flop, and it is always a very nice matter to know just when to do it
+and what to flop to.
+
+This is a pretty floppy year, no doubt about it. I’d give a penny to
+know whose cart-tail, if any, I should aspire to mount. Great din at
+this writing, and a handsome field of candidates, with leaders whom
+we have been contemplating for months, and putting on the scales and
+pulling off, and whose points we have reckoned and re-reckoned. And as
+it comes to the choice, how prevalent is dubiety of mind as to whether
+we shall get candidates for whom we want to vote! Was there ever such
+a lot of men put up for office? I read the papers, all varieties of
+them, and have been studying candidates hard now for three or four
+months, and begin to wonder how so many incompetent or unprincipled
+citizens have contrived to cheat the gallows and avoid all places of
+detention all these years. Not one of them has so much as been to
+jail as yet. I dare say they would pass even now as half-way decent
+men if they were not candidates. Perhaps we are too particular. I
+notice that a large proportion of the important work in the world has
+been done by pretty bad men: men, some of them, who would have been
+insufferable if they had not been indispensable. When things are in
+a bad-enough hole, the indispensable man has to be taken whether he
+is insufferable or not. But luckily we’re not up against it so hard
+as that. Nobody seems indispensable this year. Our world seems to me
+less tippy nowadays, blowing as it is at all its blow-holes, than it
+did six or seven years ago, when stocks were kiting and being kited,
+and everybody was consolidating, and every active person who wasn’t a
+syndicate or an underwriter of something was asking the way to those
+fashionable employments. We have blown off a lot of steam since then,
+and our safety-valves are all working pretty well; and, though they’re
+noisy, to me they don’t look dangerous. We must be patient with the
+candidates, and look sometimes on their bright sides. When we regard
+them all with discontent, it is too much like that common saying, “Why
+do women marry such men?” They marry the best in sight, and that’s all
+we can do about candidates. But, by George! the light that beats upon a
+throne is mere moonshine to the light that beats upon a candidate.
+
+We shall see about the candidates, but just what we shall see beats me.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION
+
+
+We want to ask people to dinner--at least _I_ do--and do ask a good
+many, first and last, in spite of restricted space and our other
+restrictions. About four besides ourselves is our limit, and that’s
+a dinner-party. More often I bring home a man, or a married pair of
+our generation come in and bring new topics and points of view, and
+sometimes news, into our discourse. People seem willing enough to come
+to dinner if you have something to eat in the house and something to
+say. I sometimes wish we had more dinner-parties, but the doctrine of
+compensation comes in on that, for, I suppose, if we were rich enough
+to have people to dinner whenever we wanted, we would have to dine
+out the rest of the time, and the upshot of it would be that we would
+never have time to read up anything really good to say. But we do dine
+out considerably as it is, not only with our cherished relatives who
+regale us when occasion offers (and also when it doesn’t) with meat,
+drink, and affection, but also with our friends, both those who live
+somewhat near our economic plane and those who move and have beings in
+planes much more exalted and profuse.
+
+For example, we dine sometimes with Major and Mrs. Brace, indulgent
+elders of whom I have so often spoken, and who, I think, are disposed
+to assume some restricted but affectionate responsibility for our
+successful progress through this vale of dues. We are on such terms
+with that family that Mrs. Brace has a habit of telephoning to Cordelia
+please to come and fill in at a dinner-party when a pair of guests give
+out at the last moment, which we do, when we can, with cheerfulness of
+spirit. Then the Major bestows little jobs of law business on me from
+time to time, and is apt to say “Come to dinner, and talk it over, and
+fetch Cordelia.” And then we talk other things over also, and maybe
+play auction bridge for an hour.
+
+The last one of Mrs. Brace’s dinners we filled in at was unusually
+well stocked with persons apt at discussion, and the talk took a turn
+toward the education of women, and more particularly the education of
+daughters of well-to-do parents in New York. On the general subject I
+don’t see that there is much to discuss. The prevailing practice is
+to teach girls up to eighteen or nineteen years of age anything that
+they will consent to learn, the same as boys. The girls don’t go to
+college yet as generally as the boys do, but they go a good deal, and
+more and more, I should say, all the time. The girls’ colleges prosper
+and increase in number and in size, but the authorities seem to feel
+that they have not yet fully struck their gait; not yet established
+themselves as the best places for girls in general between eighteen and
+twenty-two, and not yet demonstrated to the satisfaction of all the
+observant and considerate that the training they give fulfils its aim,
+and is better worth the time of girls who acquire it or might acquire
+it than some other things that some of them are or might be doing in
+those four years, if they were not doing that.
+
+You may say that the same reluctance of unrestricted approval attaches
+to the boys’ colleges. There was the New Haven lady who felt so
+strongly that Yale was one of the more popular gates of hell, and
+the late Mr. Crane, of Chicago, who maintained that our whole system
+of college education was pernicious and a shocking waste of time,
+and Dr. Wilson, late of Princeton, who felt so strongly that the
+college side-shows, athletic and social, had diverted to themselves
+the stronger currents of young life, to the great detriment of the
+academic performance in the main tent, and who did what he could to
+bring them back. Certainly the boys’ colleges are imperfect enough,
+and are conceded both by their friends and their detractors to be so,
+but at least they have won in the competition with home training. As a
+rule, the boys who can, go to college. They may not get there what they
+should, but they are not kept at home and put into business, or brought
+out into society, for fear that what they may miss by not staying at
+home will be more valuable than what they may gain by being in college.
+All sorts of boys go to college; the rich and the poor, the fashionable
+and the simple; the boys with a living to scramble for, and those with
+cotton-wadded places and ready-made incomes waiting for them. It is
+felt that boys must know one another if they know nothing else, and
+that college is a good place to get that knowledge.
+
+So it is felt about girls, that they must know one another, and also
+boys, if nothing else, but college is not yet the place where the
+more modish girls in the biggest cities can know the girls whom it
+belongs to them to know. The American girls from the big cities who
+are advantageously situated for experiments in polite society do not
+yet go much to college. Their brothers go as matter of course. Their
+brothers, like as not, are sent five or six years to boarding-school,
+and then three or four years to college, and then perhaps kept away
+several years longer learning the rudiments of some profession in which
+they start to work at twenty-five or later. But to keep the girls off
+in institutions away from their mothers, until they reach so ripe an
+age as that, or even the maturity of twenty-two, is an experiment that
+affectionate parents who have social aspirations for their daughters,
+and some means of furthering them, are apt to look upon with hostility,
+doubt, or, at best, with grudging and uncertain approval. The mass
+of the college girls seems to be recruited from the lesser cities,
+or from families whose daughters have a doubtful prospect, or worse,
+of inheriting means of support, and must, as a matter of common
+prudence, be qualified betimes for self-maintenance and all the kinds
+of self-help, against a turn of fortune that may leave them without a
+competent wage-earner to depend on.
+
+These considerations all got due attention at Mrs. Brace’s
+dinner-party. “Send Maria to college?” exclaimed Mrs. Van Pelt. “What
+for? She’s eighteen, and has been to school as it is ever since she
+was four years old, and to boarding-school three years, and knows an
+enormous amount, and can read and spell fairly, speak some French, and
+read German, and knows the English kings, and a few of the Presidents,
+and whether Dryden or Milton wrote the ‘Fairy Queen.’ Mercy! The
+child’s crammed with knowledge; what she needs to know is how to use
+some of it. She can’t talk at a dinner-party. I want her to learn to
+talk. I want her to have an acquaintance. It won’t hurt her to inspect
+the young gentlemen. The colleges are nunneries, full of nuns whose
+mothers I don’t know, busy learning unimportant things like how to cut
+up frogs, and the pedigrees of the Saxon kings, and eschatology, and
+neglecting all the important things like how to put on a hat, how to
+cut up a lobster, how to keep hair attached to the scalp, how to talk
+to a boy, how to help a mother, how to engage a cook, whom to ask to a
+dinner-party. Why college? Maria’d come home in four years, forgotten
+by all the girls she ought to know, qualified to be a school-teacher
+and with a large acquaintance among young ladies similarly qualified,
+and with a strong and reasonable impulse to put her acquirements to
+practical use either by continuing her studies or getting a situation
+and earning her living. I don’t want her to get a situation and earn
+her living, I want her to get married.”
+
+“Oh, come!” said the Major, who was sitting next to her. “It isn’t so
+bad as that. I know Maria. She’ll get married anyhow, but give her
+time. Does she want to go to college?”
+
+“She could have gone. She knew enough when she got out of school. She
+passed the examinations, and she thought about it more or less. But
+finally she came out instead. She may go yet. I don’t know. She still
+talks to her father about it, and meanwhile she takes courses with
+learned women about art and such things, and does something at music.
+And she goes to dances a little, and dines out a little, and slums a
+little, and organizes charity a little.”
+
+“Does she play with the boys?”
+
+“A very little. The young men don’t seem to be the absorbing interest
+they were when I was young. But I suppose that is more a change in
+human nature. New York has come to be a good deal of a street-car, with
+people crowding in and out all the time, and the conductor perpetually
+calling out, ‘Please move up there in front!’ Girls and young men don’t
+meet here familiarly any more. I don’t know how they ever see enough of
+one another to get married unless they meet in the summer somewhere.
+New York girls seem mostly to marry men they meet on steamers,
+nowadays.”
+
+“I understand,” said the Major, “that our population is now divided
+into those who travel and those who stay at home. Those who travel
+meet, especially on steamers where they are cooped up together with
+a week of idle time on their hands and are liable to develop mutual
+appreciations. Those who don’t travel also meet more or less, and some
+of them seem to marry. There were you and Cordelia, Peregrine; you were
+not a traveler, yet you got married somehow.”
+
+“Oh yes,” said I. “I had to. There was nothing else that I wanted to do
+that was compatible with earning a living. I never traveled. I never
+could; but Cordelia traveled plenty.”
+
+“To be sure,” put in Mrs. Van Pelt, “they can travel if they don’t go
+to college. It doesn’t cost much more, and they have the time. And
+they do travel. Also they visit about with their school friends, and
+find their way about Boston and Philadelphia and Washington and other
+places more civilized than this, and I have known of girls who went to
+visit in St. Louis, Chicago, and St. Paul, which was interesting and
+enlarging to the mind, though not so necessary perhaps as though we did
+not have the finished products of those cities brought daily to our
+doors, and could not inspect them and the rest of the United States any
+day on Fifth Avenue, or by walking through the Waldorf-Astoria or the
+Plaza Hotel, or at home, or out at dinner--and I beg you to recognize,
+Mrs. Lamson, that I remember that we borrowed you from Seattle, and
+you and your husband, Mrs. Butler, from Buffalo, and that I, who was
+brought here from Baltimore, speak humbly and with great respect of
+all our Western cities. But send your girl to college, and then she is
+like a butterfly pinned to a card. Can’t visit, can’t travel, can’t
+beguile her father, can’t console her mother, can’t take her brother to
+dances, can’t pay calls, lost to earth, learning the family connections
+of mollusks--what is a mollusk?--and the other unusable things that
+erudite people have put into tiresome books. And yet I don’t doubt that
+Maria’s father will send her to college if she wants to go.”
+
+Mr. Van Pelt, farther down the table, seeing that his wife had the
+floor, had lent an ear to her deliverance. “Well,” said he, “what can
+you do? Four years is only four years, and a girl in these days can
+afford to spend it in getting something definite and lasting, if only
+she gets it. I only know this game of being a girl by observation. I
+have never played at it. But my wife knows it as a player, and what
+she perceives in it by experience and instinct always outweighs my
+theories in my own judgment. She decides these matters except in so
+far as Maria decides them for herself, which is a good ways. My wife is
+uncertain about the good of girls’ colleges because she never went to
+one. They’re very new. They didn’t prevail so much in her educational
+period as they do now. They must be excellent for girls whose mothers
+are desperate or frivolous characters, from whom they need to be
+separated. All the institutions are valuable in separating children
+with possibilities from impossible parents. But where the parents
+are not impossible, of course the separation involves loss. We feel
+as to boys that the gain pretty certainly counterbalances it. But we
+feel that girls do well to form the habit of living at home, which is
+something that takes practice, and even prayers, if you’re going to do
+it as you should. If Maria goes to college, I’m for having her sleep
+at home, where I can see her at dinner. Though whether that’s right
+or not, I don’t know. I don’t expect to give Maria more than a very
+imperfect steer in this life anyhow. That’s all I got; all my wife
+got; all my father and mother got. But I don’t mind taking a chance
+if it looks good, and the fact that college does not fit conveniently
+into the social machinery that has been devised for the development
+of girls in New York does not appall me. The machinery exists for the
+benefit of the girls, not the girls for the machinery. What we are
+after is to train fine women. You don’t do it by wholesale processes.
+It is hard work, anyhow, and what suits one doesn’t suit another. It
+is with a girl, I take it, as it is with a boy. The facts they get in
+college they mostly lose, but the minds of some of them expand in the
+process of getting facts, and gain scope and power, and the ability to
+understand things, and increased interest in life, and capacity. Any
+way, so that the girls get their own.”
+
+“If we’ve all got to vote presently,” said Mrs. Brace, “no doubt the
+girls will have to go to college. I’m told we’re not constitutional in
+our political remedies.”
+
+“As to votes,” said the Major, “it’s a case of half-knowledge is a
+dangerous thing. The most able women that I happen to know, the most
+thoroughly trained and schooled in hard mental work, those that seem to
+me the deepest thinkers, don’t want votes for women. Of course college
+at its best is only a step, but it is a step toward sound thinking. I
+should be inclined to argue that college for a girl was a step toward
+giving her such a grasp upon human affairs and the conditions of life
+as would incline her to leave votes where they are, and spend her
+strength in other forms of expression. So if Maria sends herself to
+college, Van Pelt, it may be a process in the making of a really able
+anti-suffragist who will understand herself, and other women and men,
+and can sift the chaff out of an argument. If the suffragists are to
+be beaten they will be beaten by the rest of women--those who have
+found their vocation and are happy in it, those who are busy, at least,
+whether happy or not, and cannot be harangued into excitement about
+politics, and those of first-rate mental powers and deep experience,
+who can turn the whole matter over in their minds and conclude that
+woman suffrage would not help society. At any rate, woman suffrage or
+not, the way out lies in the direction of more power in the human mind,
+male and female, and not in less.”
+
+We males continued to discuss this subject when the ladies had gone
+out and we went into the Major’s library to burn tobacco. They set
+upon me as the latest transplantation from the college nursery into
+the garden of actual life, and demanded to know what I had got out
+of college. I said that for one thing I had got an acquaintance with
+several hundred men of about my own age, a good many of them now living
+in New York and the rest scattered variously about the country. Some
+of these men I knew intimately. All of them I knew well enough to have
+views about their qualities, and what I knew of them helped me to
+know other men, and gave me a measure which helped me to estimate men
+in general. I said that the way to know pictures was to be where you
+could see pictures, that the way to know men was, doubtless, to live
+with them and look them over, and that college--a big college--was a
+very convenient place to view a collection of young men, and learn
+to know the species. I said I didn’t think any other thing we got in
+college was so important as that, because the other things you might
+learn in a big college could be learned anywhere if you took the
+necessary time and put in the necessary work. But the beauty about
+college was that you had the time there to add to knowledge in all
+the ways, to learn the men and also to inspect the books and examine
+the mental secretions of the professors, and that with reasonable
+gumption and diligence you could do it all. As to that end of it I
+quoted Tomlinson, who dined with us the other night. He is a still
+more recent college product than I am, and is still immersed in law
+studies. We got to talking college and what we thought it had done
+for us, and he said, as I remember, that he could hardly recall a
+fact that he had learned in college, but still he thought he had got
+great good out of it. When he was an undergraduate, he said, he was
+interested mostly in history, government, and economics. When he got
+out, his tastes entirely changed, and he got interested in literature
+and philosophy. “Nowadays,” said he, “I look forward to Sunday with the
+utmost impatience, and when it comes round I put it in with Spencer,
+Huxley, and Emerson. I am getting to be an authority on biology, I tell
+you, and wrestle with _First Principles_ in a way to make my law-books
+jealous.”
+
+They were quite interested in Tomlinson. The Major said he loved to see
+a boy come out of college with a desire to know something. “Now that
+boy,” said he, “is really interested in what is going on, and wants
+to know why. It’s delightful. He’s got the inquiring mind, and, you
+see, college has developed it. Perhaps it would have developed anyhow,
+but at least the environment was favorable. It’s a mighty inquisitive
+mind that develops on general lines if it is put hard into the game
+of money-grubbing at seventeen. And I don’t know that the game of
+‘society’ is so much better for girls, though it is better in this:
+that its more strenuous phase doesn’t last long, and after that a girl
+who has not yet formed an attachment has a great deal more leisure
+than a boy who is tied up to a job. We should recognize that ‘society’
+is intended to give to girls that acquaintance with people, and the
+opportunities to observe them and handle them, that Jesup, here, values
+so much in college. Only ‘society’ does not include the systematic
+cultivation of recorded knowledge which the colleges still exact. If
+your Maria, now, Van Pelt, could supplement her social experiments with
+such fruits of college learning as that young Tomlinson reports, she’d
+be ahead on it. Don’t you think so? She’d be a more interesting woman,
+and have a livelier interest in life, and take hold of things more
+intelligently, and put in her spare time to better purpose, and have
+more fun. It is a great thing, it really is a great thing, to get the
+young started up the tree of knowledge; to get them to want to know,
+and start them climbing.”
+
+“I agree with you, Major,” said Mr. Van Pelt. “I quite agree with you.
+But Tomlinson’s a boy and Maria’s a girl. Is that going to make a
+difference? Evidently Tomlinson’s not going to let the trees obstruct
+his view of the forest. He seems to be after knowledge because it will
+help him to understand life. That’s all the good there is in knowledge.
+Now I see women who seem to claw after knowledge as though it were a
+sunburst, or some such embellishment that adorned them to good purpose.
+I see their minds caked up with it, so that they don’t work well. Some
+of the learned ladies are tiresome, just as some of the learned men
+are. They are not tiresome because they know too much, but because they
+lack the instinct that should tell them how to be interesting. You know
+a lively retail shop with a good show-window is always more interesting
+than a storage warehouse, no matter what treasures the warehouse may
+contain. I was saying the other day that Mrs. Jameson, the professor’s
+wife, was such a charming lady, and a very accomplished woman who heard
+me, said, ‘Oh yes; but she doesn’t know English literature.’ What odds
+whether she knows English literature or not if she is a charming lady?
+As much English literature as will make her lovelier and better able
+to express herself and more interesting and wiser is a good thing, and
+more than that is of very secondary importance except to a specialist.
+But that other lady who did know English literature like a specialist
+spoke of Mrs. Jameson’s defective hold on it very much as though it
+were an absent sunburst or an unbecoming gown. As for Maria, I should
+hate to spoil a woman to make a scholar. But on the other hand, I
+should hate to stunt a woman to make a pretty lady.”
+
+The Major said that in Maria’s case he would rather take the first
+chance than the second. “But if you will encourage Maria to come around
+here to dinner, Van Pelt,” he said, “I’ll get Jesup to catch that young
+Tomlinson person, and we will examine his mind. Perhaps Maria may be
+interested to look into it, and if she is, I should love to see her
+try. I don’t know why, but when I hear of girls who are disposed to
+use their heads to think with, and who think it would be nice to know
+what’s doing, I always have irresistible impulses to abet them. They
+may sometime--yes, any time--think out and disclose such interesting
+things. For, after all, women are women, and we men all grope and want
+to know when we speculate about them.”
+
+He got up, went to a table drawer, and got out a little paper, which he
+gave me, saying “Here’s a tract for you, Peregrine,” and then we went
+back to the ladies.
+
+When Cordelia and I got home that night, and had viewed, approved, and
+tucked in our slumbering son, Samuel, and had discussed the company and
+their discourse, I brought out the Major’s tract and read it to her, to
+wit:
+
+“What are regarded as the great prizes of life--fame, money, and such
+showy things--are nearly all things geared to the powers of men. It is
+easy to measure the successes of men. They stand out in plain sight to
+be weighed and examined.
+
+“But the successes of most of the successful women are much
+less tangible. As a rule they are contributions to life as it
+passes--influence, care, nurture, direction, companionship; valuables
+of the highest order, but which finally appear, not as properties of
+the woman from whom they proceeded, but of the men or the children who
+received them, and the families and communities that they have blessed.
+
+“The evidences of the success of men stand on pedestals and hang on
+walls and are recorded in books and occupy safe-deposit boxes in bank
+vaults. They stretch across the country in the form of steel rails or
+copper wires, or stand as buildings in stone and steel. On every one of
+them is the woman’s hand. In every one of them she has had her share.
+There is no success of any kind, no power, no progress, which is not
+half hers. But ordinarily she does not much appear; not, at least,
+in a degree at all commensurate with her importance. Her work is not
+expressed--not much--in things. It is made flesh.
+
+“Is that unjust to her? Is it unfair that man should seem to outdo her?
+
+“Who shall say what is fair and what not in the management of this
+universe? We flatter ourselves with the idea that the Almighty has
+chosen to express Himself in mankind. Admitting that, it is a daring
+critic who will assert that woman is disparaged because it is allotted
+to her to express herself in like fashion.”
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE
+
+
+How am I to get a garden for Cordelia? I love so to see her in a
+garden. They’re fine for women. I like them myself, but the calls
+of the industry I pursue below Canal Street distract me from
+floriculture and personal pokings in the earth. I don’t even _plan_
+garden in any detail, which is partly, of course, because we have
+no actual garden possibilities yet to plan, though we still aspire
+to remote rhododendrons. But I get perceptible refreshment out of
+flower-beds, and very innocent and healing joys in the colors and
+texture and designs of flowers and the various patterns of millinery
+they affect. They are the great natural argument for art and beauty;
+immensely consoling and inspiring both for what they are and for what
+they intimate. Admiring them, even the imperfectly Scriptural, like
+me, revert instinctively to Scripture and to consideration of the
+lilies, that toil not, neither spin, and yet are in the front of the
+competition for looks, and fit for their beauty’s sake to reproach the
+doubts of them of little faith. Certainly the Creator did not get up
+flowers for nothing.
+
+We must have a garden, if only for its pious uses, but for Cordelia
+it has admirable physical and mental uses besides. It gives her all
+the exercises--of mind, body, and spirit. Detached as she is from the
+soil she sprang from, in her mother’s garden she gets personally back
+to earth, grubbing in it with trowels and like implements, with beads
+on her brow and blisters and mosquito bites wherever they happen to
+come, but with a zest and an enjoyment that comes near to passion.
+Our parents, happily, have pretty good gardens, and all the spring we
+have been improving the week-ends by getting near to nature on the
+paternal suburban reservations. This being Samuel’s first spring, he
+has viewed it mostly from a perambulator, but, so seen, it has been
+profitable to him, and he has regarded its advances with perceptible
+approval, especially when it has been warm enough, and dry enough, for
+him to sleep informally out-of-doors. No doubt the modern theory is
+sound that it is never too cold or too wet to sleep out-of-doors, but
+Samuel, being naturally robust, has never had to be absolutely modern
+in his observances. I leave it to any fair person if it is tolerable
+to think of his growing up without close and long association with the
+green-and-brown earth? Yet children do it by the hundred thousand in
+New York, and a fair proportion of them grow up stronger and better
+than a considerable proportion of the country-bred children. There
+are children, I am told, whom the city agrees with, and others--a
+minority--who suffer from the nervous tension of it. It is agreed, I
+suppose, that all children are better off out of town in summer, but so
+are grown people, provided they go to a healthier place and can find
+fit employments, or make them for themselves. But the hardy children,
+like the hardy grown-ups, seem to get along in town or out. I find that
+in June the country air begins to taste different from the town air,
+and when I get off the cars in the rural districts I fill my lungs with
+great gulps of it, to the easement of my feelings.
+
+Bless me, how much we want, and how much it seems to cost to get it!
+Everybody wants a lot nowadays, and everybody, except the seriously
+opulent, seems to find the cost excessive. I suppose everybody wants
+for his child what Cordelia and I want for Samuel. Everybody seems to
+want to live some sort of a life that’s worth living, and to get the
+price of it somehow. It is a large contract for society to meet these
+natural and reasonable desires; no wonder the world’s machinery groans
+so, and that strikes and perplexities and trust trials so much abound,
+and that so much talk is in the air about the right of the people to
+rule. But ruling is a skilled job, and though it is none too well
+done, and never has been, the notion that “the people” are first-class
+experts at it who are kept out of power by interlopers seems to me
+more or less humorous. And so is the notion that we “people” have any
+great eagerness to rule. We haven’t. That’s one trouble. Almost all of
+us want to go about our business and procure some of the ameliorations
+of existence. Ruling is hard work and small pay. We want some one else
+to do it, if possible; some one who has a call and feels that he has
+a talent for government. These gentlemen who talk about the people
+ruling are usually gentlemen who have inward admonitions that they
+possess governmental talent. We choose between them, and to that extent
+we rule, and have been ruling for some time, and will rule, I guess,
+for some time to come.
+
+Cordelia and I would like to vote for more room in our flat. It’s too
+tight. Now, with Samuel and his belongings to provide for, we haven’t
+room to hang up and put away our things. We want a larger apartment,
+cheaper food, especially milk, reduction in the price of clothes,
+lower servants’ wages--more, generally, for our money. But I don’t
+know just how to vote for these things without running up against
+the reasonable needs of other people. All the measures I would favor
+as suitable to make my earnings go further seem constituted to make
+somebody else’s earnings less. That wouldn’t hinder me from voting to
+reduce the tariff, because I think it ought to be reduced, but I don’t
+want to vote any less wages for Matilda Finn. Demand and taxation fix
+rents; how am I going to vote them cheaper? If the Meat Trust makes
+meat unduly dear, I’m against it; but I am not at all sure that it
+does. If the excessive multiplication of grocers makes potatoes high,
+it is a pity, but how am I going to vote against it? I can vote, when
+the chance comes, for the best city government that is offered, and
+the best obtainable bargain about public utilities, and supervision
+of milk, and such things; and I can vote for tariff reform, and trust
+regulation, and conservation in so far as those desirables are affected
+by retaining or dismissing the present administrators of the Federal
+government; but after I have voted all I can--and expressed my primary
+preference, and initiated and recalled and referended, if those
+privileges are offered me--it will still remain undoubtedly that if I
+want more closet-room for Cordelia and a continuing residence in town
+and a garden somewhere, I’ve got to get in more money. So I’m in just
+the same case as the mill-hands and the miners and everybody else who
+has been on a strike lately, except that I haven’t got to strike unless
+I want to, and I sha’n’t want to until I have an offer of something
+better than I’ve got now.
+
+It makes me ashamed to keep wanting more money, even though the
+mill-hands and miners and the rest feel just as I do about it. But,
+after all, that want is the great spur of civilization. If most of
+us didn’t want more closet-room, and a garden, and a roof-garden
+sleeping-apartment for Samuel, and a little larger dinner-parties
+than we can give as it is and more of them, and food, clothes,
+education, leisure, travel, automobiles, and all the other necessaries
+and unnecessaries, I suppose all progress would slacken. The whole
+apparatus of civilization seems to be geared to these more or less
+humble human desires. Politics is a sort of rash that breaks out on
+bodies of men that are tired with too much work, or hungry, or starved
+in their spirits, or thwarted in their aspirations, or who need more
+closet-room and gardens. The politicians are not rulers, after all;
+they are doctors, making diagnoses, and offering prescriptions and
+treatments, and taking fees, and flunked a good deal of the time by the
+symptoms of the patient. A real cure of human ailments by politics is
+inconceivable. There are too many people, and they want more than there
+is, and if they were all satisfied for once at a quarter past six,
+there would be a lot more of them, and they would have developed a lot
+more wants, by seven o’clock. But that only proves that politics is a
+continuing job, that never will lapse, and never will be finished so
+long as there are folks on the earth.
+
+It is wonderful what is accomplished; how we endure labor, privations,
+disappointment, restricted closet-space, and lack of gardens, and go
+on comparatively orderly and patient, getting what we can and going
+without the rest. Shops are full of goods and the doors open; trains
+run, crowds surge here and there, strikers strike and pickets picket,
+judges sit, juries find, the polls open and close, and the papers tell
+us who was elected. Somehow, in all this muddle, life is fairly safe,
+most of the people are fed, babies get attention, the dead are buried,
+the processes of existence go on.
+
+The whole of politics seems secondary because the whole material side
+of life, even gardens and closet-room, seems secondary. I guess that
+is what saves the world alive. There are not enough material things
+to satisfy everybody. I doubt indeed if there are enough to satisfy
+anybody. But of the things of the mind and of the things of the spirit
+there is a boundless supply, and any one who can may help himself.
+
+We scramble for things as though they were all there was, and yet the
+main joys of life are in ideas--in religion, in love, in beauty, in
+duty, in truth--things that no trust can monopolize, and which come
+tariff-free through any port. They are the realities, and these bodily
+things are mostly shadows, indispensable, to be sure--things that it is
+a reproach and a high inconvenience to be without, but which take care
+of themselves so long as the realities prosper.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, I have got a boost. Major Brace has suggested to me that I move
+my tools over to his office this fall and become a partner in his firm.
+The suggestion is agreeable to me, and I have closed with it. His firm
+is undergoing reorganization. At present it is Brace & Ketcham, but Mr.
+Ketcham’s wife has fallen into so much money that, having also some
+savings of his own, he feels the need of foreign travel, country air,
+and like delights, and proposes to retire from active practice and
+concern himself with self-improvement, cows, and public or quasi-public
+duties, like being a director in banks and corporations, serving on
+committees, or even running for public office. There seems to be a
+great deal for competent and experienced citizens to do whenever they
+have acquired the means of support and can afford to take nominal pay,
+or none, for their services. The new firm is to be Brace, Witherspoon
+& Jesup; which last is me. It will be a strong firm. The Major has
+experience and connections; Mr. Witherspoon has knowledge, especially
+of law, and appalling diligence; and I have a living to make for
+Cordelia and Samuel and myself, and everything to buy, including a
+city mansion, a country residence, some automobiles, and a garden with
+rhododendrons in it. When I think how modest my proportion of the
+firm’s winnings is to be, and how much it is to buy, my arithmetical
+talents are strained to compute the princely affluence that must be
+coming out of the new firm to the Major.
+
+Anyhow, my circumstances will be eased enough for us to move into a
+more commodious flat next fall, which is important. The modification
+in my prospects pleases me very much. I am attached to the Major.
+He is good to be with. I feel confident that he will make a living,
+and either make it honestly or make it look so honest to me that my
+self-esteem will not be wounded by a lot of compunctions. I think
+so because I believe he is at least as scrupulous as I am, and has
+more experience in adjusting his scruples to the facts of life. And
+that is a mighty delicate matter. If you can’t do it you get nowhere,
+and if you overdo it you get eventually, I presume, to that ideality
+that we call “hell.” I don’t know that I should necessarily mind
+that, for it is possible that the attractions of hell may have been
+under-rated; but I hate consumedly the processes of getting there as I
+see them. The by-path by drink is so far out of my line that I don’t
+have to take serious thought about it; nor yet about the propensity
+to divagations in feminine companionship, which makes some persons so
+much trouble; but I believe I may say without affectation that I would
+hate the detachment from that ideality which we call “truth.” Surely
+the greatest possible luxury in life is to think you are on the right
+side; to know the truth and follow it, or at least, since we are all so
+fallible, to think you know it and are on its trail. To think that I
+was going to practise law merely as the agent of the astute, filching
+unwarranted profits from the simple, would be quite intolerable, of
+course. It would be so at least as long as I continued to be any good,
+for I should think of it as a progress to “hell”; and when it ceased to
+bother me, that would be the sign that I had arrived. That’s the kind
+of hell the idea of which is repellent--the hell in which the damned
+are fat and hard and solvent, and relentlessly and eternally gainful
+for themselves. Ugh! They make me sick; at least the thought of them
+does. When you come to look for them in the flesh, of course they have
+their human modifications and are often lean, jocund, and charming.
+
+The Major says there’s a new morality growing up that will express
+itself presently in some new commandments, or a new interpretation of
+the sixth. Stealing, as heretofore understood, has been limited, he
+says, to taking from some one something that was his. But there is a
+growing sentiment that it applies also to hogging an unconscionable
+amount of things desirable for the mass of folks, but to which none of
+them had established legal ownership. As “the people” grow stronger
+and more intelligent there is more interest in having them get what
+should be coming to them. So the Major looks for the evolution of a
+commandment to the general effect of “Thou shalt not take more than
+thy share,” and for lots of legislation based on it. And since what
+anybody’s share is depends on all manner of circumstances, and is
+highly debatable, and is sure to get into court again and again, he
+looks for busy--and profitable--times for our profession.
+
+Meanwhile the bulk of the law business is not a wrangle between the
+wolf and the lamb, with all the best talent retained for the wolf.
+A good deal of it is wrangles between wolves, wherein it is just as
+virtuous to be on one side as the other; and a lot more of it is not
+wrangle at all, but a tame exercise of the lawyer’s true profession of
+keeping order in the world.
+
+All the same, it must be embarrassing to any lawyer’s ethical
+self-esteem always to be the defender, at a high price, of the
+strong. It can’t be easy to avoid it, once a man gets a considerable
+reputation; but I guess it does pinch. Politically, of course, it
+is very expensive, and that, without much regard for the truth that
+when Strength is right, even though it is incorporated, it is just
+as important to society that it should get its dues under the law as
+though it were somebody else. The risks of an employment are one of
+the considerations on which its rate of payment is based, and in this
+legal employment to which I seem committed, the risk of discredit may
+well be one basis for extra large fees. Disreputability is bound to rub
+off of clients on their lawyers, provided there is enough of it, and
+the association is long enough continued, and highly enough paid, or
+insufficiently varied by professional associations of another sort.
+
+I should not like to be committed bodily to the side of the Haves in
+my legal experiences, and I know I never shall be so long as I am in
+the same firm with the Major. Neither do I want to tie up to impossible
+enthusiasms and altruisms; and to plans that won’t work, and to
+fabulous expectations of making the earth equally comfortable for all
+its residents irrespective of their powers and qualities. The Major
+does not go in for those phantoms. He will not always be right, but he
+will never be systematically impossible.
+
+I guess Witherspoon is going to get rich. He is terribly smart; so
+smart, and so nearly sound-minded, and so nearly drink-proof, that,
+with the start he has, it will be virtually impossible for him to stay
+poor. If not myself, I would rather be Witherspoon than any one I see
+about. I could not afford to be the Major; he is too old. I have too
+much to do, and too much expectation of liking to do it, to wish to be
+he, much as I like him. Witherspoon is older than I am, older by nine
+or ten years, I guess, but I could almost afford that advancement in
+years for what I might gain in ability by having his head instead of
+mine. Not, of course, that I would be he, unless it was compulsory that
+I should be some one other than I am. A property that one has taken so
+much pains to improve as me becomes dear to the owner. I rate among
+improvements Cordelia and Samuel (though you may call them liabilities
+if you like), all that I know, my acquaintance, my reputation, the
+repairs done on my teeth (which were quite expensive), advertisement
+as so far acquired (except as already mentioned under acquaintance and
+reputation), a little life insurance paid up to date, and there must
+be a lot of other improvements I can’t think of. To offset all that, I
+have expensive habits (like Cordelia and Samuel) and the probability
+of others. I smoke and drink, though inexpensively as yet, and like
+better food and rather better clothes than I am entitled to.
+
+One thing that I admire about Witherspoon is his clothes; they are so
+bad--or rather he is so oblivious to them. I guess they are pretty good
+clothes, but he is apt to wear them like a man in the woods; I see
+him sometimes going about in this polite community in rough-looking,
+unshiny, russet shoes, a flannel shirt with a soft collar, his trousers
+turned up, not precisely but casually; and if he has on black shoes,
+like as not they are not polished. That is liable to be his working
+dress. He does better at times; does better doubtless if he happens to
+think of it or his wife tells him, and he togs himself out properly
+when he goes out to dinner; but his mind is not on raiment, nor much
+on details of living, anyhow. Presently, I suppose, his wife will say
+he must have a valet, and his clothes will be pressed and laid out for
+him for the rest of time, and he will put them on and always go forth
+shining. But he’s fine as he is.
+
+It is grand to be enough of a man to be worth a servant to do all one’s
+chores. It is also grand meanwhile to be able to dress as inattentively
+as Witherspoon does. If he were lazy he couldn’t do it, nor yet if he
+had not on him so many of the marks of a first-class man. If he were
+just ordinary, you’d be displeased with him for not being clean-shaven,
+but when he smiles and begins to talk you don’t care whether he shaved
+yesterday or the day before, nor whether his shoes are blacked, nor
+what kind of a collar he has on.
+
+I’m not that way at all. I have to wear respectable clothes, brush my
+hair and teeth, shave every morning, black my shoes, and pay attention
+to millinery. I succeed in all these details, and would make, I
+suppose, an acceptable body-servant for a really great man, or a fairly
+good housemaid, if it were not that I am able, under Providence, to
+put the remnant of my time after attending to my own details to more
+profitable use than doing ordinary details for some one else. Details
+I shall do, no doubt, for some time to come if not forever, but they
+will be fairly remunerative details, I hope, requiring judgment and
+knowledge.
+
+It’s all service, and all that matters much to the moralist is that
+each of us should come, somehow, where he belongs, and get the sort of
+job he can learn to be good at, and delve at it until a better one
+calls him--if it does. But of course to find one’s proper job is a
+great achievement in life, being the one that engages my energies at
+present. Also to find a man proper for a job that needs doing seems to
+be a considerable achievement, bigger or less big, according to the
+size of the job, but supremely important when the job is a vital matter
+like the Presidency sometimes, or the discovery of an effectual general
+in war, or a revolutionary leader. The processes by which the top men
+come to the top are as interesting as anything in history. Indeed, they
+almost constitute history. Usually they are processes of trying out,
+and it seems that the qualifications for a great place must include,
+as a rule, the ability to get the place, and, if it is political, to
+get it away from somebody else. But the unpolitical places don’t seem
+so much to be wrested from anybody. The most powerful men just come to
+their own. Commonly they make the places which they occupy, and the
+places grow with them, until, when they get out, there is a gaping
+vacancy to be filled.
+
+That is not the sort of place for which the Major has selected me. Not
+yet. It’s just a chance to do some work as it comes along, and make
+a place, possibly, which can be recognized as definite, commodious,
+and profitable because of some scarcity of the qualities required to
+fill it. I have great confidence in the Major, and feel strongly that
+his judgment in choosing persons and foreseeing labors for them is
+excellent, and I have faith in particular, as I have intimated, in his
+sagacity in selecting Witherspoon. So I am a good deal pleased that he
+should have invited me.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
+
+
+Typo corrected: “perfomance” to “performance” (page 128).
+
+Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been left unchanged.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78473 ***
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+      Reflections of a beginning husband | Project Gutenberg
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+<body>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78473 ***</div>
+
+
+
+<h1 style="color: #ff4200;">
+REFLECTIONS OF<br>
+A BEGINNING HUSBAND
+</h1>
+
+
+<p class="center p4">BY<br>
+<span style="font-size: large;">EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN</span></p>
+
+<p class="center" style="font-size: small;">AUTHOR OF<br>
+“THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN”<br>
+“LUCID INTERVALS,” ETC.</p>
+
+<figure class="figcenter illowp15" id="colophon" style="max-width: 5em; margin-top: 6em;">
+  <img class="w100" src="images/colophon.png" alt="" data-role="presentation">
+</figure>
+
+<p class="center p6">HARPER &amp; BROTHERS PUBLISHERS<br>
+NEW YORK AND LONDON<br>
+MCMXIII</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<p class="center ep6">COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER &amp; BROTHERS</p>
+
+<p class="center">PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p>
+
+<p class="center">PUBLISHED APRIL, 1913</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="CONTENTS">
+    CONTENTS
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<table class="autotable">
+<tr>
+<th class="tdl" style="font-size: small;">
+CHAP.
+</th>
+<th></th>
+<th class="tdr" style="font-size: small;">
+PAGE
+</th>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">
+I.
+</td>
+<td class="tdl">
+<span class="smcap">By the Second Intention</span>
+</td>
+<td class="tdr">
+<a href="#I">1</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">
+II.
+</td>
+<td class="tdl">
+<span class="smcap">Some Details of Living</span>
+</td>
+<td class="tdr">
+<a href="#II">27</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">
+III.
+</td>
+<td class="tdl">
+<span class="smcap">Commodities and Contentment</span>
+</td>
+<td class="tdr">
+<a href="#III">52</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">
+IV.
+</td>
+<td class="tdl">
+<span class="smcap">The Baby</span>
+</td>
+<td class="tdr">
+<a href="#IV">73</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">
+V.
+</td>
+<td class="tdl">
+<span class="smcap">A Contribution from Major Brace</span>
+</td>
+<td class="tdr">
+<a href="#V">94</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">
+VI.
+</td>
+<td class="tdl">
+<span class="smcap">Politics</span>
+</td>
+<td class="tdr">
+<a href="#VI">116</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">
+VII.
+</td>
+<td class="tdl">
+<span class="smcap">We Dine Out and Discuss Education</span>
+</td>
+<td class="tdr">
+<a href="#VII">125</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+<tr>
+<td class="tdl">
+VIII.
+</td>
+<td class="tdl">
+<span class="smcap">My Prospects Improve</span>
+</td>
+<td class="tdr">
+<a href="#VIII">146</a>
+</td>
+</tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p class="ph1 ep6">REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING<br>
+HUSBAND</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_1">[Pg 1]</span></p>
+
+
+  <p class="ph1">
+    REFLECTIONS OF<br>
+    A BEGINNING HUSBAND
+  </p>
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="I">
+    I
+    <br>
+    BY THE SECOND INTENTION
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="upper-case">“Dear</span> Mr. French,” my letter began,
+“Cordelia and I have a mind again to
+get married. But having once been engaged
+and quit, we have no mind at all to be engaged
+again and divulge it. Would you mind, please,
+you and Mrs. French, if we eloped? It seems
+so much the more feasible and private way.”</p>
+
+<p>I would rather have broken it to him by word
+of mouth, but for some things it is written words
+or none. If you have determined to elope with
+a man’s daughter you can’t very well go and
+ask leave of him. Suppose he objects! Of
+course he will object, especially after consulting
+his wife. The only way, if you propose to consult
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_2">[Pg 2]</span>him at all, is to write, and mail the letter
+on the way to the church and come back to the
+house afterward for the answer.</p>
+
+<p>Cordelia felt she just couldn’t be publicly
+engaged to me again. Of course I didn’t mind.
+I think meanly of the engaged state <i>per se</i>, but
+I had always rather be engaged to Cordelia than
+not. But that was only because I had always
+wanted to marry her, and had been glad to
+throw any convenient obstacle, even an engagement,
+in the way of her marrying any one else.
+The thing that had bothered me was to have the
+engagement end without our being married. I
+wanted to have it die a natural death in church,
+with flowers and a minister, and it had irked me
+very sore indeed to be “released” like a baseball-player
+before the end of the season. It left me
+on a miserably awkward footing with the rest
+of the world and with her, and it left her in the
+same case. Nobody quite knew whether to congratulate
+either of us on getting rid of the other.
+People naturally wanted to know why, and of
+course you can’t tell in the newspaper. It was
+awkward for our families. There was a feeling
+that they ought to quarrel, because somebody
+must be to blame, and the other side ought to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_3">[Pg 3]</span>resent it. But they didn’t want to quarrel, and
+wouldn’t; not even a little, to keep up appearances.
+They held their tongues and went on
+about their business as before, but inevitably
+flocked more apart than they had been wont to
+do, because when they met it excited too much
+interest.</p>
+
+<p>I don’t mean that they were such conspicuous
+people that the London papers had cables about
+them. It was only that when Mrs. Fessenden
+or Mrs. Somebody Else got home from the
+Jenkinses’ tea she told her family, and whomever
+she had to dinner, that Mrs. French and
+Harriet and Mrs. Jesup were at the Jenkinses’
+and spoke, as they passed, as politely as though
+nothing had happened. And then would follow
+a little chattering tribute of discourse about
+Cordelia French and Peregrine Jesup, and why
+did they break their engagement, anyway!</p>
+
+<p>Not that my family, or Cordelia’s, got direct
+reports of what was said at Mrs. Fessenden’s
+dinner-table. They didn’t; at least, not often.
+But they knew what must have been said, and
+families don’t like to be subjects of speculation
+or of critical or even compassionate observation.
+They can bear the eye of approval, of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_4">[Pg 4]</span>admiration, and even of a moderate envy, but
+what family likes to have the Fessendens, the
+Jenkinses, the Underharrows, the Overtons, and
+the rest of the families getting their heads
+together to swap surmises as to what the
+Frenches and the Jesups have got in their
+closet!</p>
+
+<p>Maybe you’d like to know why Cordelia and
+I loosed hands after our intentions had been
+six months on file. In this private way why
+should I not explain that it was not so much
+the fault of either of us as of the conditions
+of life as we found them. You see, I was
+twenty-three, and Cordelia was two years
+younger. I was studying the profession in
+which I hope to be useful in my day and generation,
+and by the practice of which I hope to
+derive a respectable maintenance from a contributory
+world, which Cordelia was already
+inspecting. That’s what she was doing. She
+was out of school and looking about, shifting
+from continent to continent to get a better
+view; getting acquainted with people and
+things, ascertaining whom and what she liked
+and what places seemed more joyous to her
+than others. What for so much inspection
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_5">[Pg 5]</span>and investigation to prepare her for a destiny
+already measured off, tied up, and waiting to be
+called for? If she had been in college, she might
+possibly have kept. I don’t know what are the
+merits of the women’s colleges as depositories
+for engaged girls, but they may have a value
+for that use. But a roving life of enlargement
+by travel and social experience has no such
+value at all. There was I, tied up to professional
+studies, on such allowances as my indulgent
+parents could afford me without too
+gross injustice to their own family life and their
+obligations to their other dependents. And
+there was Cordelia, diligently qualifying herself
+to live creditably and profitably on an income
+of from twelve thousand a year up.</p>
+
+<p>You might suppose that ordinary precautions
+would have been taken to prevent her from seeing
+much of a person so unsuited to her needs as
+I, but they were not. There was nothing
+against me: I had no criminal record, did not
+drink much, was of respectable origin, had
+known Cordelia a long time already, and was
+such a person, in a general way, as she might
+properly enough marry sometime, if circumstances
+suited. Cordelia came out, and went
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_6">[Pg 6]</span>to dances and dinners. She had to dance with
+somebody. Male persons of the dancing age
+and disposition with incomes of from twelve
+thousand up are rather scarce. Dances cannot
+be equipped with such alone: neither can dinners.
+So Cordelia danced with anybody who
+asked her soon enough, and that was often me;
+and she ate her dinner alongside of whoever
+was put next to her, and that was sometimes
+me. And when it wasn’t me I wished it was;
+and so what happened, happened all in natural
+course and according to reasonable expectation,
+and nobody ventured to disprove, though doubtless
+there was a fair volume of conjecture as to
+whose money Cordelia French and Peregrine
+Jesup proposed to get married on. But we
+had not selected anybody to underwrite our
+prospective happiness. We had not got so far
+as that. We had just got irresponsibly engaged,
+according to the American plan and the
+spontaneous promptings of youth and affection.</p>
+
+<p>What about our current American practice
+of turning most of the girls loose from school
+at eighteen or nineteen and keeping most of
+the youths, who are their natural mates, tied
+up to professional studies or business apprenticeships
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_7">[Pg 7]</span>four or five years longer, and letting
+them play together meanwhile, and expecting
+them to shape their own destinies on practical
+and satisfactory lines? Isn’t a good deal expected
+of us young people, all tinder, sparks, and
+indiscretion? The French, they tell me, expect
+less and provide more. I have thought a good
+deal of these concerns since Cordelia and I were
+first engaged and found our intentions unseasonable.
+Of course, I wanted to be considered
+in Cordelia’s plans and deportment;
+wanted, naturally, to have her stay around
+where I could see her at recess and on Sundays
+and other holidays, and perhaps meet her at
+festive gatherings when the urgency of my
+studies permitted me to get to them. I liked
+to have her around handy, but of course I
+could not interdict her from going about, or even
+from going beyond the seas when it suited her
+parents to take her. I could say that she had
+already seen as much of the world and the
+people in it as was necessary, but how was I to
+insist that, while I was cultivating and improving
+my abilities all I knew how, Cordelia should
+let most of hers lie fallow and mark time and
+wait? If she had only had a steady job to work
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_8">[Pg 8]</span>at in the intermission while I was qualifying
+myself to work at mine, things might have
+worked out serenely; but the only job she had
+was to get married, and meanwhile to cheer
+and satisfy her parents, and try to be worth
+her keep to them while she was making acquaintance
+with the world. Marriage seems
+to be a complete occupation (circumstances being
+favorable), but being engaged isn’t. It’s
+just a makeshift, delightful for six weeks, very
+suitable for three months, and tolerable for six;
+but when it contemplates indefinite extension
+into uncertain years it is an asset of very
+doubtful value to a girl in active social life.
+When the Frenches found that Cordelia seemed
+to be losing interest in affairs, was indifferent
+to dances and dinners, was apt to be abandoned
+by mankind to the society of chaperones, was
+getting left out of house-parties that I could
+not go to, was gently indisposed to put the sea
+or any wide expanse of land between herself and
+me, and was rather aggravated than appeased
+by the little she could see of me when I was
+near, they said—the parents did: “This isn’t
+working to much of a charm! Nobody is ahead
+on it, and we are getting behind. Cordelia’s
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_9">[Pg 9]</span>no fun any more, and there is no end of it in
+sight.”</p>
+
+<p>And soon after Cordelia and I called our
+engagement off, much to our grief and with the
+sympathy of our elders. I advised her to put
+me down to the account of experience, and try
+to figure out a profit on me, if she could. But
+I never put her down to account of anything,
+being of just the same mind about her that I
+always had been, though grievously put out to
+leave her blooming on the paternal bush without
+any “hands-off” sign on her, protected only
+by her natural thorns.</p>
+
+<p>There was a line in the paper to say the engagement
+was off, Cordelia went abroad again,
+I continued my studies, and time went on. It
+does go on somehow; the trick is to keep on
+going with it. Who does that, gets somewhere
+in spite of impediments, lacerations of the
+affections, and all misgivings about the possibility
+of there being a gap anywhere in the procession
+of self-supporters that a new aspirant
+can fit himself into. I have been called “sensible.”
+It seems a painfully tame thing to be,
+and I presume I was called so by way of disparagement.
+But, after all, there are times
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_10">[Pg 10]</span>when there is no choice but between being
+sensible and being silly, and then you have just
+got to be sensible if you can, no matter how it
+tastes. Being sensible, while one is working
+to get a start in life, must be excused, because
+it is the price of adventure, indiscretion, speculation—all
+the really glorious and spectacular
+parts of human existence.</p>
+
+<p>Three years I was sensible and plugged away
+at my job, learning the rudiments and then the
+application of them. All that time I had never
+a word with Cordelia. How could I? I could
+not go on where I left off, and unless, or until,
+I could do that, how could I go on at all? Sight
+of her I did have now and then, but seldom;
+for, though she was often in town and I nearly
+always there, our occupations usually kept us
+from accidental meetings. We didn’t travel
+the same beats.</p>
+
+<p>I finished my professional studies, sustained
+the tests provided to measure my proficiency,
+and got a job in an office with a small salary
+and some prospects. Candor requires that I
+admit that I passed those examinations pretty
+well, for really I had not spared work in the long
+preparation for them.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_11">[Pg 11]</span></p>
+
+<p>And the job I got was a good one as beginners’
+jobs go, and the prospects were as good, so far
+as I could see, as the prospects of anybody of
+my time of life and in my line of endeavor. So
+I didn’t see why, barring accidents, I should
+not get somewhere presently.</p>
+
+<p>So the months sped. Coming early up-town
+on a late October day, I got into a pay-as-you-enter
+car at Forty-second Street, and there was
+Cordelia, alone and with a seat vacant beside
+her, which I took.</p>
+
+<p>“This is a fine day,” said I, “and you become
+it very much, and I hope you have good
+health?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh yes,” said Cordelia.</p>
+
+<p>“And good spirits?” said I.</p>
+
+<p>“Oh yes;” but she said it more doubtfully
+and with no more than a languid affirmation.</p>
+
+<p>“And I hope that sport is good,” said I; and
+she assented to that, but in a way that suggested
+that it might be more boisterously satisfactory.
+And with that we fell into discourse,
+trifling but easy, and that progressed in its tone
+from easy to friendly, and from friendly to
+old-friendly. And I let the car pass Fifty-fourth
+Street and pretended to myself I was
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_12">[Pg 12]</span>going to Fifty-ninth, and let it pass Fifty-ninth
+and pretended nothing further to myself.
+It wasn’t until some days later that I learned
+that her intended destination was Fifty-seventh
+Street. As it was, while rolling through the
+Sixties we each cautiously discovered that we
+were bound for the Museum at Eighty-second
+Street, and there we got off; and since it was,
+as I pointed out to her, too lovely an autumn
+day to go indoors, we went and sat down in the
+Park instead, and there, a little off the track
+of passers-by, fell into discussion of the conditions
+of contemporary existence.</p>
+
+<p>“Cordelia,” said I, “are you having any fun?”</p>
+
+<p>She meditated a moment. Three years is a
+long time in the early twenties, and Cordelia
+had grown perceptibly thoughtfuler since she
+and I left off.</p>
+
+<p>“Fun? Oh yes, I have <i>some</i>. It has been
+a pleasant summer. We went abroad in the
+spring, and it was nice in the country after we
+got home. People were sometimes interesting;
+some of the books were good to read; I liked
+the flowers in the garden, and I liked to ride a
+horse, and sometimes motoring was pleasant,
+and the swimming and the sailing.”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_13">[Pg 13]</span></p>
+
+<p>I confess that my heart settled back a bit at
+this list of profitable occupations. “Are you
+marrying any one this fall, Cordelia?” said I.
+“Have you an interesting line of suitors now?
+Or can it be that being well off you have the
+unusual discretion to realize it?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, I realize it; yes, a good deal. But I
+am only temporarily well off.”</p>
+
+<p>“What’s the matter? Father’s stocks look
+shaky to you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh no. Father doesn’t seem anxious.”</p>
+
+<p>“Suitors, maybe. Perhaps you feel yourself
+near capitulation?”</p>
+
+<p>“Possibly! But I have not diagnosed it so.”</p>
+
+<p>“Down there where you spend your summers
+there are stock-brokers growing on every
+bush, and the stock-brokers, you know, Cordelia,
+are the only <i>young</i> men—except the
+hereditary rich—who have money enough to
+get married on.”</p>
+
+<p>“Why didn’t you turn to that yourself,
+Peregrine?”</p>
+
+<p>“I? Bless you! I never had a chance.
+Nobody ever seemed to see the making of a
+stock-broker in me. And besides—well, I confess
+I have never felt drawn to that vocation.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_14">[Pg 14]</span>I would like uncommonly well to earn plenty
+of money, and I mean to, sometime; but I’d
+rather have the pay seem more like an incident
+of my job than have my job an incident of
+my pay.”</p>
+
+<p>“I’m afraid you are not a really earnest
+money-maker, Peregrine?”</p>
+
+<p>“Just wait till I get a chance to throw in my
+clutch; then you’ll see! And I’ll soon begin
+to get it now! But if you think well of the
+stock-broker calling, Cordelia, there was Archibald
+Tassel. I heard of him as having the discernment
+to be your warm admirer; and a
+wholesome, hearty young man too, and well
+found. And yet you seem never to have smiled
+on him?”</p>
+
+<p>“So?”</p>
+
+<p>“It must be you don’t care for a sporting
+life. Well, I am only moderately drawn to it
+myself. You have to work so hard and pay
+so high for what you get, and it’s so hard on the
+tissues, and you get so little in the end. But
+there was that cheerful young Van Terminal,
+Cordelia; pockets bulging with ancestral coin;
+nice manners, immense energy, large appetite for
+pleasure, four or five automobiles in his garage,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_15">[Pg 15]</span>and a private tank of gasolene with a pipe-line
+connection with Hunters Point. If there is an
+eligible young man about, it is Corlear Van
+Terminal, and yet, Cordelia—”</p>
+
+<p>“Mercy, Peregrine, would you have me
+marry him?”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh no! By no means. No! No! I never
+was the least keen to have you. But why didn’t
+you?”</p>
+
+<p>“Why should I?”</p>
+
+<p>“Everything money can buy, and not such
+a bad encumbrance. Amiable young man
+enough, and you with your great qualifications
+for companionship and direction might have
+kept him out of serious mischief all his days.
+I don’t say you could have done it, but it was
+conceivably possible.”</p>
+
+<p>“He’s very nice and so jocund. Mother and
+I were much pleased with him—are still. I
+don’t know what efforts I should have made if
+it hadn’t been for father.”</p>
+
+<p>“What did <i>he</i> say?”</p>
+
+<p>“I hardly like to tell you!”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh yes, do!”</p>
+
+<p>“He said: ‘Good God! Cordelia. Not that
+one! Wait, and perhaps you may catch a <i>man</i>!
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_16">[Pg 16]</span>Leave those joyous natures to marry chorus
+girls,’ he said, and told me I was built for something
+better than to be the ballast for a joy-rider’s
+motor-car. That’s just like father.
+He’s not very practical. But it flattered me,
+and I didn’t try after that.”</p>
+
+<p>“Poor girl! What a father! What a tremendous
+handicap parents are, anyway!”</p>
+
+<p>“You needn’t complain of father. That was
+the only time he meddled. He has done his
+best for me. He knows admirable young men!
+‘Father’s friends,’ I call them. Somehow they
+never make up to me. But I’m improving;
+I know I am. I think so much my hair is coming
+out, and the day may come when I shall
+find grace in the eyes of one of ‘father’s friends.’”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh no! Cordelia, don’t! I have a better
+plan for you. I know such a good young man,
+who has needed you with gnawing destitution,
+night and day going on four years.”</p>
+
+<p>“How interesting! The poor young man!
+Destitute of me and I suppose of all the other
+goods of this world, and mortgaged besides for
+the support of his aged grandmother! I beg
+you, Peregrine, not to attempt to entangle me
+with impossible good young men. Life is too
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_17">[Pg 17]</span>fleeting. The American spring is too short.
+All in a minute is it summer, and to-morrow
+comes Fourth of July and haytime, and we are
+cut down and cast into the oven.”</p>
+
+<p>“Well, dear Cordelia, take a broker—take
+a broker! Or some nice old gentleman; or a
+widower or something, with ready-made shekels
+strung on him!”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t be unkind to me, Peregrine!”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, well—I was telling you—where was I?
+You put me all out when you speak like that.
+Oh yes—the good young destitute man! Well,
+the good young man has no grandmother to
+support—only himself as yet, and can do that,
+by George! And it’s time; he’s rising twenty-seven.
+And his prospects are not bad now.
+And if he could manage to get married they’d
+be better; they’d have to be. You see, we
+have to get one thing at a time, and I’ve known
+awful cases—even I in my short experience
+have observed them—of men who waited until
+they had got a good living before they got
+married, and found, when they got ready to
+get a wife, that their minds had been on other
+things so long that they had clean forgotten
+how. That’s awful, isn’t it? It happens all
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_18">[Pg 18]</span>the time. I see it at the clubs. I don’t want
+it to happen to—to the good young semi-destitute
+man I had in mind.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh no, Peregrine; surely not. It’s an awful
+thought; awful! But yet, suppose he got
+the girl, what—”</p>
+
+<p>“What costs so dreadfully much, Cordelia?
+I know of quite a decent flat for fifty dollars
+a month; a nice flat over a tailor shop, and not
+in Harlem either—not twenty blocks from where
+we’re sitting. And for three dollars a day you
+can get food enough for two or three persons—eggs
+not superlatively fresh, perhaps, but
+eggs—and for a dollar a day you can hire a
+very good servant, and that’s only a little more
+than forty dollars a week; and a good young
+man of twenty-seven, with four or five years of
+hard work behind him, who can’t see his way
+to lay his hands on at least sixty dollars a week
+isn’t good enough for you. But sixty would
+about do it, Cordelia. Sixty plunks is a great
+deal of money—a whole lot of money to earn—but
+not an unattainable wage; not one that a
+diligent and competent trained hand need consider
+the limit of his aspirations—no, not in a
+city like this with a traction company to be
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_19">[Pg 19]</span>supported, and eighty million people in the
+back country to help pay five millions of us
+for living here.”</p>
+
+<p>“You are a more calculating person than you
+used to be, Peregrine. When did you work all
+that out? And suppose it were possible to live
+on sixty dollars a week, what makes you think
+it would pay to do it, and why do most people
+of our habits think they need so very much
+more?”</p>
+
+<p>“The trouble with them is they haven’t been
+emancipated. The things that cost are amusement
+and social aspirations. If you can cut
+those out for a time, living is not so impossibly
+dear. But stupid people can’t do it, and unemancipated
+people don’t dare to.”</p>
+
+<p>“Unemancipated? Unemancipated! Unemancipated
+from what, Peregrine?”</p>
+
+<p>“From <i>things</i>, Cordelia, and the habit of
+needing them in superfluous quantity; from
+the standards of living set by people who are
+poor on fifty thousand a year; from the idea
+of life that is based on what you have got; from
+automobiles, and expensive sports, and boxes
+at the opera; from the notion that it is essential
+to keep in the swim, and know only the right
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_20">[Pg 20]</span>people; from pleasures and from people that
+waste time and money and give nothing back
+that is worth having.”</p>
+
+<p>“My! Peregrine! When did you turn anarchist?”</p>
+
+<p>“Not long after our engagement was broken.
+I loved you, Cordelia, that’s the truth, and I
+hated everything that broke it. I learned to
+see that there was no obstacle between you and
+me that a little time and hard work could not
+easily overcome, and that the obstacles that
+looked biggest and blackest had no real substance
+to them, and could be brushed aside
+whenever we were ready and had the grit to
+do it. Don’t cry, Cordelia! If you let me
+hold your hand again, I don’t think any one
+would notice.”</p>
+
+<p>“I was—I wasn’t crying, Peregrine. I—I
+was—only thinking!”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t cry! Because this is such a delightful
+world for folks who are free and can work,
+and have the courage to shape their own courses.
+It looks all lovely colors to me, with you here—so
+much to get and such an interesting stunt
+to get to it; so much to do, and such inspirations
+for the doing of it; such excellent loads to lift
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_21">[Pg 21]</span>at and maybe shoulder. Think, Cordelia,
+think by all means! That is the most fun
+there is, and the most we shall either of us get
+for some time to come if you marry me on
+sixty dollars a week. Oh dear! There were
+times when I feared you weren’t going to wait!
+Those were the worst pinches of the pull. To
+get tired and have no heart of refuge to fly to—you
+know that is pretty trying, Cordelia.”</p>
+
+<p>“I know, Peregrine. And to wait with
+folded hands and not know—it tries the faith.
+A bunch of roses on my birthday, a bunch of
+roses on Christmas morning, not a line with
+either of them! Oh, Peregrine!”</p>
+
+<p>“There! Nobody saw us but the squirrel!
+‘Far out of sight, while sorrows still enfold us,
+lies the fair country where our hearts abide.’
+Do you know that hymn, Cordelia? There
+were days together when it ran in my head.
+It meant heaven to whoever wrote it, but to
+me it meant a fifty-dollar-a-month flat and
+you.”</p>
+
+<p>“Don’t cry, Peregrine!”</p>
+
+<p>“I wasn’t crying. But you must allow a
+man some sentiment. Are you game for the
+flat and sixty dollars a week?”</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_22">[Pg 22]</span></p>
+
+<p>“Let us look at the flat. I hope all the
+rooms are not cupboards. Do you know that
+my aunt just passed on the drive in a victoria?
+Gracious! I have just time to get home before
+dark and dinner.”</p>
+
+<p>That was the substance of the discourse we
+had that autumn day. I never mailed that
+letter I wrote to Cordelia’s father. We concluded
+that it would not be polite to our parents
+to elope, and, since we both had very indulgent
+parents, what was the use! So I broke it to
+the old man, and he was quite reasonable and
+let me stay to dinner, and we had champagne.
+And Cordelia’s mother was kind, too, and though
+she declared that I was as bad a match as any
+worldly-wise woman could ask for, she felt that
+Cordelia had come as nearly to years of marital
+discretion as women who get married ever
+come, and that it was certainly time she knew
+whether I was the ineligible man she wanted
+or not.</p>
+
+<p>So I told my own parents, too, and my father
+smiled and said more marriages hereabouts
+seemed to be spoiled nowadays by too much
+money than by too little; and my mother shed
+some tears, but they were not tears of discontent.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_23">[Pg 23]</span>She has begun to be interested in my
+trousseau, and keeps suggesting things that I
+had better buy and have charged to Father,
+and I hear of her being seen in the neighborhood
+of auction shops where they sell furniture,
+and she has counseled me by no means to
+trench upon Great-aunt Susan’s legacy, which
+constitutes the total sum of my private fortune.
+It is not a large legacy, and how I shall
+ever add anything to it, except Cordelia, I
+cannot imagine; but I am going to somehow,
+and meanwhile Cordelia will be an immense
+asset and make me a rich man at the start.</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps Aunt Susan’s legacy will start on
+its career as the total fortune of a married man
+by a period of depletion; for the truth is I am
+not taking in the whole of sixty dollars a week
+at the present juncture. It is no great income
+to command at twenty-seven if one has begun
+his money-getting at seventeen, but it is a great
+deal for any one of that age who has spent
+three or four years in general enlargement of
+the ideas and experiences in a college and three
+or four more in learning how to do something
+that will support life.</p>
+
+<p>I observe that elders are fairly willing to abet
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_24">[Pg 24]</span>the young in getting married if only the adventurers
+are positively enough set on the adventure
+and have the courage of their intentions.
+The thing that the wiser elders won’t do if they
+can help it is to take responsibility about the
+intending parties being pleased with their bargain.
+For the rest, unless the adventure is <i>too</i>
+rash or premature, or they have violent personal
+objections, the elders, as far as I see, are
+apt to be complaisant, and even to push along
+an affair that is clearly at the stage where it is
+safe to push it.</p>
+
+<p>The cards are out for three weeks from next
+Thursday. It was the first our friends in general
+heard of it, which was as it should be. The
+flat is hired, and yesterday I got my pay raised
+five a week. Where there’s a will there’s a way
+to break it, the lawyers say, but Cordelia and
+I have passed through that once, and our will
+is going to probate this time.</p>
+
+<p>I am thinking about what we shall talk about,
+for talk will have to be our main reliance for
+entertainment. There’s a fireplace in the flat,
+and I dare say I shall be seen going home
+dragging boards and boxes after me like the
+children one sees in the street, for I don’t know
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_25">[Pg 25]</span>how we shall afford any wood for that fireplace.
+Wood, I understand, is dear. Never mind;
+we shall have a fire and sit before it, and talk
+about everything—about votes for women
+(which I don’t want, though it matters little),
+whether we ought to be abstainers (I’d rather
+not, but it matters little), whether the good
+English are played out, about the future of the
+Roman Catholic Church in the United States,
+whether it isn’t time for the Democrats to shelve
+Thomas Jefferson and get a new prophet,
+whether Tammany will ever be killed permanently
+dead and what then, whether the
+People have got any sense, whether legislation
+has an important effect upon divorce, whether
+the Americans are too much bent on substituting
+legislation for character, and all those
+things that one thinks about.</p>
+
+<p>I wonder if she will be willing to talk about
+those things! Very likely she won’t. It will
+be more prudent, I think, not to let her see the
+catalogue of them beforehand. Unless brought
+up to them gently she might shy. One talks, I
+find, to another person a good deal according
+to what is in the other person’s mind.</p>
+
+<p>And for a change we can gossip, and extenuate
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_26">[Pg 26]</span>our neighbor’s faults, first agreeing what they
+are, which always is a pleasant exercise. And
+when somebody makes a good book with real
+meat in it, well served—if any one should—we
+can read it, and that’s fun, and cheap, and will
+make more talk. And charities are interesting
+if one goes at them right (and cheap as things
+go), and so are politics.</p>
+
+<p>It is such an interesting world if you get the
+hang at all of what is going on in it, and why,
+and whither things are tending! I do love to
+see it roll along and to try to puzzle out why
+things happen as they do. It will be fun to
+talk to Cordelia about all these matters. What
+is there about a woman’s mind—if it is a fairly
+good one—that it is so extraordinarily stimulating
+to a man’s mind, so that when you’re too
+tired to talk to a man you can chatter on
+amazingly to a woman, provided she’s the right
+one! They beat drink; they certainly do!
+They are the great natural stimulant and tonic
+for mankind.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_27">[Pg 27]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="II">
+    II
+    <br>
+    SOME DETAILS OF LIVING
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="upper-case">Cordelia</span> and I duly got married (see the
+newspaper a piece back) and are still married,
+and, speaking for myself and, as far as
+observation enables me, for Cordelia, we are still
+pleased with our audacious experiment. But
+why should I call it audacious? I am more and
+more impressed, so far, with the calculating
+prudence of it, and surely sensible observers
+must agree with me, and for ten who will think
+we were rash to get married on sixty dollars a
+week there will be hundreds, certainly, who
+will smile at the idea of that being a doubtful
+income to marry on.</p>
+
+<p>Our maid, Matilda Finn, is a person of considerable
+talent. I doubt whether two people
+who aim to subsist on sixty dollars a week are
+entitled to have a maid at all. I dare say they
+belong in a boarding-house, or else in a flat
+where they do their own work and put at least
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_28">[Pg 28]</span>fifty dollars in the bank the first of every
+month. Oh, delightful thought! Imagine being
+six hundred dollars to the good at the end
+of the year, and putting it into some safe gamble
+that would be the corner-stone of a competence!
+And if I had only courted Matilda
+Finn instead of Cordelia it would have been so
+easy! Do you remember Andrew Cannybee
+and his first investment in Pullman? But he
+was living with his mother then and had few
+expenses. I suppose the money-savers are
+folks who go without everything they want
+except money until they cease to want it. That
+would have been all right if I had wanted
+Matilda Finn. I know I could have held myself
+down to self-denial until I could really
+afford to marry, and by that time I should have
+got over wanting Matilda. Whereas I never
+could endure the thought of not wanting Cordelia.
+I am afraid the Cannybee strain in me
+isn’t strong enough to do any good. I seem to
+like life while it is here.</p>
+
+<p>All the same I like Matilda, who is part of
+life at these presents, and so does Cordelia.
+Matilda is cheerful, she is clean and indulgent,
+and she can cook. When food is scarce and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_29">[Pg 29]</span>dear and you have to have it, you don’t want
+to have it fooled with by the wasteful or the
+inexpert. The little that man wants here below
+he has to have two or three times a day, and it
+does make a difference how it is fixed up for
+him. Consider the staples of nourishment—bread,
+toast, tea, coffee, bacon, eggs, chickens,
+chops, beefsteak, fish, codfish, oysters, clams,
+lettuce, rice, beans, milk, and the package
+foods that some of us eat for breakfast to
+divert our minds from diet! How various are
+the dealings of the human mind and hand with
+these simple alimentary provisions! What
+grace or defect of human character is there that
+cannot find its demonstration in the way an egg
+is dropped on toast! There is as much difference
+in toast as there is in people; there is
+a great native difference in eggs, and much individuality;
+no two slabs of bacon are alike
+to start with, or are affected quite the same by
+smoke and other processes of education. When
+it comes to coffee, what a problem! Leaving
+out all the coffee that is not coffee at all, consider
+the horde of coffees that <i>are</i> coffee; their
+propensity to masquerade under names that
+do not belong to them, to be blended, and to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_30">[Pg 30]</span>taste unexpectedly every time you get a new
+lot!</p>
+
+<p>But give the coffees their due. Nearly all of
+them are good. It is only that some of them
+are enough better than others to interest an
+aspiring spirit which reaches out instinctively
+in the direction of the highest good for the
+money. Such a spirit will early recognize that,
+food being variable, the mind that prepares it
+should be constant and sagacious in its processes.</p>
+
+<p>I would not have you suppose I am an epicure.
+I never think much about food unless
+it is not so good as I think it ought to be, all
+things considered; or else is better than I expected.
+There needs to be some standard of
+nourishment in a family, and in our family of
+three it has to be adjusted to an expenditure
+of three dollars a day. Cordelia says that I
+contribute the standard and the dollars and
+leave her to furnish the adjustment. That is
+where Matilda Finn comes in. I asked Mrs.
+French once if Cordelia could cook—asked her
+quite casually, and not, of course, as though it
+was of any consequence. She said yes, that
+every woman could cook, and that Cordelia
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_31">[Pg 31]</span>could, of course, and that the question was
+whether any man could live off her cooking.
+She has taken cooking lessons since then and
+courses in Domestic Science, which includes
+cooking, and I think she can do it. But cooking
+is an agitating job, and I don’t like to have
+Cordelia agitated. Nor is there any need. I
+like better to have her stick to her own profession,
+which is ministering to happiness. I
+suppose they don’t teach that in the domestic-science
+courses. Cordelia ministers to Matilda
+Finn’s happiness, and Matilda cooks and does
+all the other things that need to be done in a
+flat, except what Cordelia and I do; and Cordelia
+ministers to my happiness remarkably.
+All sorts and conditions of folks Cordelia ministers
+to: she has captivated her mother’s
+market-man, with whom she talks meat, poultry,
+fish, politics, and current events every
+morning. She knows all his reasons for the
+high price of meat. “That man,” she said the
+other day, “can bamboozle me into anything!”
+Nevertheless, she seems to be getting intimately
+acquainted with the butcher business and the
+anatomy of the animals on which we elect to
+subsist, and the comparative cost and edibleness
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_32">[Pg 32]</span>of their various sections. The spring lamb
+that we had for dinner the day Caseby dined
+with us was “a bargain I got off of Mr. Cooper,”
+who had an oversupply of fore quarters and
+sold one at a great reduction to young Mrs.
+Jesup. As a rule, we do not subsist on spring
+lamb at home in the spring. That seems to be
+a favorite dinner-party provision, and we still
+dine out enough to keep up our acquaintance
+with it. The “lamb” we have is the most
+neutral of all meats, unexciting, but sufficient
+for the purpose of nourishment.</p>
+
+<p>Cordelia sings at her work, and that makes
+me think she must like the life. Perhaps I
+should say her employments rather than her
+work. Being away all day, I don’t know very
+much about them, but at least I hear her singing
+while she is putting up her hair.</p>
+
+<p>This matter of woman’s work looks important.
+I wonder what they do all day—girls,
+that is, like Cordelia. If she had a job it would
+simplify matters, particularly if it was a remunerated
+job, for I dare say Cordelia would
+spend more money if she had it. <i>I</i> could.
+But it would have to be some kind of an independent
+home job, like painting or writing or
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_33">[Pg 33]</span>taking in washing. If she went out to work
+and had any boss but me, it would not be
+tolerable. Moreover, if she had a job that she
+was qualified for and was worthy of her talents,
+she would probably be better at it than I am
+at mine and earn more at it than I do, and
+then where would I come in! Think of us both
+coming home tired from wage-earning! Awful!
+I am glad she has no job except, as I said before,
+the great one of ministering to happiness.
+I seem to be just a poor old-fashioned monopolist,
+not much farther along than the Stone
+Age.</p>
+
+<p>But she does keep busy in a way. I hear of
+her making calls—though she says calls are a
+queer employment for a lady who lives over a
+tailor shop—and she goes to see her mother,
+and my mother, and various girls, and goes to
+market, and sews a little and reads a little and
+does charities a good deal, and has girls in to
+lunch and feeds them on I don’t know what.
+She says it’s not wise to break with the life you
+know any more than you have to, and of course
+that’s so; though neither is it wise to hang on
+to the life you know when you can’t afford it.
+The life you know isn’t the only good one even
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_34">[Pg 34]</span>for you. I have come to feel that tremendously
+since I turned anarchist—to feel that life is a
+big thing, a bully thing, and that we are fools
+to cramp it and trim it down too much to fit
+usage and environment. Friends are very
+valuable, acquaintance is valuable, a standard
+of living and a set of associations when once
+you are used to them are very hard to shift
+from; but all those things are the accessories
+of life rather than life itself, and it seems a
+chicken-hearted sort of prudence that would
+sacrifice life to its accessories.</p>
+
+<p>This from a man who is as sensitive as I am
+to the differences in dropped eggs, and feels as
+strongly as I do about fish-balls and bacon, and
+who likes caviare when it is really good, and
+alligator-pears, and pâtés of goose-livers, may
+sound a little forced; but must it follow that
+because one sees and admires the trees he cannot
+see the forest?</p>
+
+<p>Yes, I am glad Cordelia has no money-making
+job, but I suppose that is no argument
+against such employments for women in general
+who need them. <i>I</i>, being so gifted in money-getting
+and commanding the income I do, did
+not need to have my labors supplemented in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_35">[Pg 35]</span>the wage-earning line. <i>My</i> need was for
+assistance in spending our money.</p>
+
+<p>By the way, as I meditate on money and my
+large appetite for it and the ways of getting it,
+it occurs to me that there is a new profession—muck-raking.
+Maybe it’s not new, since nothing
+is, but at any rate it’s coming along on a
+good slant just now, is very lively, looks altruistic,
+and I dare say can be made modestly
+remunerative; for muck-rakers, of course, like
+other working folks, must live. More than
+moderately remunerative it can hardly be without
+spoiling it, for the great business opportunity
+in it would be to make a great record as a prosecutor
+and then be retained for the defense.
+To me, as a lawyer, that looks good, but there
+are those who would gibe at it as a sort of blackmail.</p>
+
+<p>Well, there does seem to be a lot of tar in
+money. Sometimes I despair of ever getting
+enough to keep an auto on without having to
+pay some impossibly defiling or enslaving price
+for it; but I haven’t got to have an auto yet,
+so I take courage.</p>
+
+<p>Father and Father-in-law both growl at the
+muck-rakers, as is proper enough for gentlemen
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_36">[Pg 36]</span>of their years and responsibilities, but the muck-rakers
+look to me like microbes of a very natural
+and timely kind, lawfully and inevitably produced,
+and going about a necessary business
+with a catching sort of enthusiasm. When they
+beat a bad grab, the anarchist in me insists upon
+rejoicing, no matter what respect the lawyer in
+me may feel for clients who appreciate lawyers
+and pay them suitably.</p>
+
+<p>Father-in-law has sent me three gallons of
+superior European champagne put up in bottles
+the usual way, mostly pints. He is a kind man.
+Why he thinks it wise to cultivate expensive
+thirsts in Cordelia and me I do not know, but
+my theory is that he thinks a taste for beverages
+that we can’t afford will make for abstemiousness.
+So it will, I dare say. Cordelia
+says the gallons are just a tribute of affection,
+unsullied by ulterior purposes of any sort. We
+are going to ask Father-in-law to dinner, and
+that is a great tribute, for even reduced to his
+simplest needs he is expensive to feed.</p>
+
+<p>Naturalists have observed and recorded a
+tendency in married people to duplication.
+That is, in some respects, a solemn thought. I
+understand you can get lots more room in
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_37">[Pg 37]</span>Brooklyn for the same money, and people do
+it; but to me that’s a much more solemn
+thought than the other one—too solemn altogether.
+Up the island there are extraordinary
+rows and successions of human hives. Cordelia
+and I catch a Sunday afternoon automobile
+ride up there once in a while and marvel
+at them as we pass. One could get a fine detachment
+up there; though for that matter
+there is an interesting grade of detachment to
+be had in Brooklyn. And detachment has its
+value—breaks habits, brings folks in some ways
+harder up against the facts of life, invites a new
+inspection of people, brings various releases
+and stimulations—but I don’t know that it is
+a thing that Cordelia and I are disposed to
+chase very hard for its own sake. We are hard
+enough up against the facts of life as it is, and
+we are gregarious people and like companions,
+and if we got a good detachment would go right
+to work, I suppose, to mitigate it by new associations.
+We will never move to Harlem or
+beyond merely for the sake of pioneering, nor
+swap associations for the mere benefit of swapping.
+And yet that’s what the Methodist
+ministers used to do under the old three-years-in-a-place
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_38">[Pg 38]</span>rule—may be doing it still. It was
+the intention that they should gather no moss,
+so the plan was to keep them rolling. To me,
+now, moss looks very nice, and I wouldn’t mind
+its adhering. I love old associations and permanence
+of relation, and my heart is even hospitable
+to some fixity of condition; but there
+is plenty to be said in favor of wearing the garments
+of life loose enough to shed them when
+they get seriously in the way. One should be
+enough of a change artist to quit a part he cannot
+excel in before the scene-shifters shut him
+out. The predicament of people who haven’t
+it in them to prosper in the social level they
+find themselves in, and who are so fettered by
+the conventions and expectations of that level
+that they can’t break into another, is very
+pathetic. We hear plenty about the tragedies
+of families that sink, but what of the tragedies
+of those that rise, as when a man makes a raft
+of money and his sons experiment with leisure,
+drink, chorus-girls, and divorce; and his
+daughter, for lack of inviting marital opportunities,
+is obliged to elope with the chauffeur!
+That sounds better than eloping with the coachman,
+as used to happen; but still there is a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_39">[Pg 39]</span>prejudice against it. Of course advantages—most
+of them—are advantageous, else civilization
+wouldn’t get ahead; but, by George!
+they have their price. If Cordelia and I were
+a grain less stylish we might be living in a
+model tenement and saving money. (I wonder
+if we could get one that would hold Matilda
+too!) The residents of New York around here
+where we live are roughly divided into two
+classes, people who eat in the front basement
+and are getting rich, and people who are too
+stylish to eat in the front basement, and have
+upstairs dining-rooms and butler’s pantries,
+and are (some of them) getting poor. The
+receipt for getting rich in this neighborhood is—Eat
+in the basement! But I’m not sure that
+it is a reliable receipt. It tends to blight some
+opportunities. Anyhow, it does not fit the
+ambitions of the socially ambitious of this generation,
+to whom eating in the basement would
+seem to conflict with about all that is delectable
+in life. Of course basement dining-rooms
+belong to the habits of forty years ago, and invited
+the simple life, which now for the most
+part has been chased into flats. But the truth
+remains that advantages are bought with a price.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_40">[Pg 40]</span></p>
+
+<p>It is harder to get something for nothing
+than we think it is when we read of wills going
+to probate. They do go there, and then it is
+to observe whether the heirs get the money or
+the money gets the heirs. We don’t take
+medicine unless we are sick. Money in large
+chunks is pretty strong medicine, but we take
+it when it offers without regard to our condition,
+and it does not always do us good.</p>
+
+<p>Tom Merchant was saying something the
+other day to the effect that a man could not
+be of very considerable use in the world until
+he ceased to be dependent on his work for his
+living. Of course that is not so, as Lincoln’s
+case and innumerable others attest, and as new
+cases keep attesting every day. Nevertheless,
+the venerable John Bigelow has said something
+very like what Tom said, and I think there is
+a slice of truth in it. Money in store is power,
+and makes for leisure to think and act, and
+may help enormously, in a crisis, to independence
+in thought and action. Lincoln was poor,
+but, after all, he had enough cash in hand to
+spare the time for the debate with Douglas and
+for all the politics that followed, up to the time
+when he began to draw a salary as President.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_41">[Pg 41]</span></p>
+
+<p>The trouble with the chaps that come early
+into ready-made money is that so few of them
+ever learn enough about common human life,
+and people, and the elements of the job, to be
+considerably useful, even if they aspire to be.
+Still, I think they do better nowadays than they
+used to. The money-getting school, whatever
+course you take, is an exacting school. Somehow
+you have to deliver the goods—some kind
+of goods that somebody is willing to pay for.
+I wonder how much the girls miss, those of
+them who do miss it, by not taking the courses
+in that school! Of course, they miss some great
+possibilities of development, but against that
+you have to measure what they would miss by
+not being able to do two kinds of things in the
+same years, and sacrificing what they get as it
+is, for what they might get as it might be.
+There comes in the division of work between
+men and women and the difference in their
+natural careers. Cordelia as she is, for me.</p>
+
+<p>Cordelia and I are agreed that we will have
+rhododendrons in our garden. Those in the
+Park have begun to bloom, and I am excessively
+pleased with them. They have such a fine
+Greek name that takes me back to Xenophon’s
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_42">[Pg 42]</span>Anabasis, and such splendid blossoms and such
+interesting shades of color, and then they bloom
+in the shade. I respect them most of all for
+that. To live in the shade and turn out so
+splendid—well, allegorically speaking, it happens
+more or less to folks, too. It will cost
+us something to have a good lot of rhododendrons
+in our garden, but when it comes to
+planning for our country place we never spare
+expense. Why should we? Frugality of imagination
+is no saving to anybody. Cordelia
+is less extravagant in that particular than I am,
+because when I see the men who earn a lot of
+money I speculate in my mind as to how they
+do it and whether <i>I</i> could do it, and I usually
+decide that I shall be able to presently if I have
+time, and then, naturally, I think what I shall
+have when I get all that money, and just now
+it is rhododendrons because they are just coming
+along. A good deal goes with rhododendrons:
+hired men, domestic animals, chariots of locomotion;
+I dare say by the time Cordelia and I
+get around to have them aeroplanes will have
+become a reasonable solicitation. But there’s
+no hurry. The rhododendrons in the Park are
+lovely, and I dare say there are more in the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_43">[Pg 43]</span>Bronx (if you can get there), and we have hospitable
+friends who have them in gardens.</p>
+
+<p>This observing the money-getters and noticing
+how they do it, and computing how long
+it will take to learn the trick and acquire the
+necessary prestige, is all right enough and even
+useful, but it plagues me when I get my mind
+too much on it. That’s not really the way to
+live—and yet, and yet. “The life is more than
+meat; the body more than raiment,” but, having
+life, meat comes very handy, and having a
+body, raiment is convenient. The people who
+miss it are those who starve life, or overlook it,
+in their solicitude for meat and motors.</p>
+
+<p>The prevalent habit of going to Europe is
+curious. For that matter the habits of contemporary
+Americans are very curious—the
+motor-car habit so conspicuous just now, their
+travel habit, much cultivated by farmers in
+winter and by city people in summer. They
+are remarkable habits; instructive, no doubt;
+expensive, but somehow at present there is
+money for them. Cordelia says she has traveled,
+and need not go on the road again for some
+time. I haven’t, but I am content to wait
+until it is convenient. This town of New York
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_44">[Pg 44]</span>is trying to live in in some ways, but it can be
+said for it that here a great many things are
+brought to the door. There are pictures here,
+and very pleasing objects in the shop windows,
+and a variety of people, and spoken languages
+enough to satisfy the most ambitious, and a
+mighty interesting assortment of architecture,
+and more making while you wait. Some Americans
+in time past have been to Europe to good
+purpose—as witness our newer architecture—and
+some keep going there to pretty good purpose
+every year. That makes it the easier to
+stay at home and say <i>Cœlum non animum</i> to
+oneself, and grub along. Cordelia and I bestow
+some of our spare attention on the growth
+of characters. They don’t seem to grow so
+very much on the road. Intelligence and powers
+of comparison may get a boost in the school of
+itineracy, but character not so probably. Corlear
+Van Terminal has been to Europe once or
+twice every year since I can remember, and
+gads constantly when at home, and all but
+sleeps in a motor-car, and yet, so far as I can
+see, he’s always just the same as he was the
+last time. I can’t see that he’s got ahead one
+lap. Chapman says the soul of man requires
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_45">[Pg 45]</span>to be fed on the Bible and the Greek poets.
+One can do that at home, and one can work at
+home, and have faith and endure and plug
+along—all quite useful to character, and as
+developing in some ways as travel and Europe
+can be in others.</p>
+
+<p>Cordelia and I have been reading about the
+Wesleys and the characters they got and how
+they got them. There were eighteen children
+or thereabouts, and a dozen or so grew up. Fine
+people, too; admirable stock and developed by
+discipline, privation, and pious training, all
+tempered by affection, humor, and lots of
+quality in the trainers. It makes you feel that
+character is a very expensive product, and
+hardly to be had at the ten-cent store where we
+and our contemporaries are prone to go for it.</p>
+
+<p>The Wesleys were poor; very much poorer
+than is thought at all suitable in these times,
+even for the reverend clergy or for the teachers
+of our youth. The father was a clergyman;
+the mother was a lady of excellent abilities and
+education, and they lived in the seventeenth
+and eighteenth centuries. Food was plain and
+hard to get in that family, and raiment was only
+slightly related to embellishment, and sickness
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_46">[Pg 46]</span>was frequent and poverty perpetual; but with
+what audacity those Wesleys took hold on life!
+It makes our timid overtures look like mill-pond
+voyaging. Really it is wholesome to sit
+by the window, within ear-shot of the rattle of
+the street-cars and the chug-chug of the automobiles,
+and read of the past straits of the straitened
+and the courage of the bold, and observe
+on what shoulders of men and women, and
+through what bogs of privation, civilization
+has come along.</p>
+
+<p>Not that the Wesleys had a preference for
+privation. The Reverend Samuel scrambled
+actively to maintain his family, but the increasing
+family outran his best diligence. We have
+changed all that. Families are less apt to outrun
+the paternal diligence in these days. So
+far as numbers go, they trudge along respectfully
+behind the census man and look over his
+shoulder at the figures. But that change is all
+in the day’s work, and springs out of changed
+conditions. People in our time are not curious
+enough about the processes of nature to raise
+very large families in order that they may
+watch near at hand the workings of the rule
+about the survival of the fittest. What they
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_47">[Pg 47]</span>can observe of the application of that rule in
+written biography and among the neighbors
+seems to suffice, and in their own personal
+speculation they seem to care for no more
+progeny than they think they can contrive
+survival for, whether they are fittest or not.
+So butts in man, and tries to adjust the processes
+of nature to match his judgment and his
+taste in expenditure.</p>
+
+<p>When it gets hot Cordelia will be going off
+to her father’s country palace in Connecticut,
+varying that experience in due time by a sojourn
+in my father’s country palace in New
+Jersey, and I shall spend with her so much of
+the time as my urban duties permit. That will
+save us from dependence on any fresh-air funds
+this year. Parents are a considerable convenience,
+especially nowadays, when so many
+of them have learned their place, and especially
+in this town of New York, where it costs all you
+can earn to provide a winter habitation, and
+where the young wives of earnest workers like
+me are apt to be a good deal out of a job in
+summer. Much more systematic provision is
+made to carry my kind of man through the
+summer than for Cordelia’s kind of woman—the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_48">[Pg 48]</span>clubs, for example. For man and wife at
+our stage of life parents, duly qualified and
+equipped, are a very suitable and timely provision.
+Indeed, I feel sometimes that the
+worthlessness and miscellaneous degeneracy of
+parents in these times is exaggerated. I don’t
+say this by way of casting an anchor to the
+windward, nor out of mere magnanimity, but
+because I honestly think so. People say that
+parental authority is all gone. Some think it
+good riddance; others lament. Since democracy
+came to be the fashion everybody wants
+his own way more than formerly, and gets it
+rather more, children included. But parental
+direction is still a factor in life, and parental
+influence is enormous, and influence gets to
+the springs of action and character even more
+effectually than dogmatic authority. It is
+much harder for a fool father to blight a Mirabeau
+nowadays, and those Wesley parents that
+I spoke of might in our time have meddled less
+with their daughters’ marriages, thereby, possibly,
+avoiding some disasters; for the Wesley
+girls chose ill, but their parents, in choosing for
+them, chose still worse. Parents doubtless
+realize the limitations of their calling better
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_49">[Pg 49]</span>than they did, and a good deal more is done in
+these days than formerly to piece out their
+deficiencies and help them with their duties.
+Doctors give them better advice than the Wesley
+parents got; schools in this country—in
+spite of the constant stream of criticism and
+deprecation which schools endure—average
+surely a great deal better than schools did fifty
+years ago. The raising and training of the
+young, being as important a matter as there is
+in sight, has had protracted attention from some
+of the best minds, and has had money showered
+on it in a huge profusion. All that has been
+more or less helpful to parents, but it does not
+warrant the idea, so popular among current
+commentators, that parents have come to be
+supernumeraries on the public stage. That is
+a ridiculous notion, the absurdity of which
+would be demonstrated in about half a day if
+parents universally should quit work and take
+a half-holiday.</p>
+
+<p>We ought to save a little money this summer
+living on our fathers. It is a grand way to
+save. I don’t know of a better. It makes
+frugality possible without self-denial—at least
+without privation. They say there is excellent
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_50">[Pg 50]</span>sport to be got out of self-denial, and I read
+that saving money and the repression of the
+impulse to spend it make like everything for
+the development of character. I dare say that
+is so. It is all a part of self-control, and of
+government by intelligence instead of by impulse.
+And self-control, including timely and
+suitable repression of expenditure, means freedom,
+and power to give, and the power to do,
+and the power to jump in and seize an opportunity.
+Possibly I can acquire the accomplishment
+of not buying some things that I want,
+even though I have the money to pay for them.
+That will be a wonderful acquisition to me,
+though I have got so far as to be mighty particular
+about what I buy on credit. One has
+got to get as far as that if he is going to get
+married on such an income as ours.</p>
+
+<p>That was a great stroke—getting married.
+I don’t see how I had the nerve to do it. Probably
+I hadn’t. I dare say we got married on
+Cordelia’s nerve, for when you come down to
+the facts it was she who took most of the
+chances, and really made the choice. To choose
+and to decide things seem in our day to be very
+largely women’s work. I am more and more
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_51">[Pg 51]</span>impressed with that as I go more and more to
+Cordelia to get her views. I get them on pretty
+much everything except points of law. I am
+the specialist on that and on the earning of
+money, but she is the specialist on the
+arrangement of life. I guess she is an obedient wife,
+but in practice I seem to make suggestions and
+she to make decisions. She makes them with
+great consideration and indulgence for me, and
+with a degree of judgment that saves me much
+mental effort. The opportunities of mental
+effort that I enjoy below Canal Street, between
+ten o’clock and six, suffice to keep my mind
+exercised, and I am no glutton about making
+unnecessary mental efforts after I get uptown.
+Perhaps that simplifies life for Cordelia. I
+wonder what women do whose husbands don’t
+have to work!</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_52">[Pg 52]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="III">
+    III
+    <br>
+    COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="upper-case">We</span> have been out to Orange County to
+spend a week-end with the Peytons.
+They are about our age, but differ from us in condition
+in that they have adequate means of support.
+Archie Peyton got them by inheritance,
+and they are very ample and enable Archie and
+Eleanor to have all the desirable things and do
+everything they want to. They try conscientiously
+to live up to their opportunities, making
+pretty hard work of it, but that’s natural, for
+it <i>is</i> hard work. They went abroad in the
+summer, and now they are providing country
+lodging and food and sport for their available
+friends. This sport is golf and tennis and road
+exercises, relieved by dabs of riding after
+hounds, for the Orange County Hunt meets
+out in their country. Eleanor says it’s nice,
+except that they have to invite too many people
+who have had too much to eat and are
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_53">[Pg 53]</span>trying to get thin, whereas it would be more
+satisfactory to be inviting people who have
+had too little to eat and were trying to get fat.</p>
+
+<p>That’s not why they asked us, for we had
+been living on our parents all summer and were
+quite plump. They have got motor-cars, horses,
+butlers, valets, chrysanthemums, greenhouses,
+and all the apparatus of pride. For us on sixty
+dollars a week it is rather expensive even to
+nibble at it. We can’t do it often, but we saved
+money living on our parents, and the fall is
+a grand season, and to fill one’s lungs with the
+air of it and one’s vision with autumn colors is
+worth some fiscal strain, and it always does me
+good, too, spiritually even more than physically,
+to get over a little easy country on a horse.
+Besides, Archie is my client, and that’s important.
+I have discovered that one of the
+great secrets of prosperity and advancement
+in this world, especially in the profession that
+I affect, is to have one’s coevals grow up and
+prosper and have business, especially law business,
+that somebody must be paid to do. When
+people have these opportunities of lawful gain
+to bestow they seem to like to bestow them on
+habitual friends, provided that they have any
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_54">[Pg 54]</span>and can persuade themselves that they are
+competent. A great deal of opportunity goes
+by association—is bound to.</p>
+
+<p>To be honest, I did not make all these discoveries
+solely on my own hook. Though they
+are simple enough. Major Brace expounded
+some of them to me after dinner. He gave me
+great encouragement in the effort to exist.
+Promotion, he said, cometh neither from the
+East nor the West, but from the cemetery, so
+it was almost sure to come to any one that
+could hold out; and in the long run a man who
+was sober, competent and diligent, and intelligent
+about his associations couldn’t very
+well miss it. There were so many advantageous
+jobs to distribute and each generation had them
+in turn, as the world and what is in it came to
+be its property. Moreover, as things go now
+and with us, each generation has a lot more
+things and opportunities and good employments
+than the generation that preceded it,
+not only absolutely, but <i>per capita</i>, because the
+increase of wealth and business is outrunning the
+increase of population. It wasn’t a scramble,
+the Major insisted, for a share in a limited
+quantity of goods, but for an unlimited quantity,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_55">[Pg 55]</span>and the harder the scramble the more there was
+to distribute.</p>
+
+<p>All that came out of a discussion whether
+we should restrict our wants or try to satisfy
+them. Try to satisfy them, the Major said.
+Effort in that direction enriches and develops
+civilization. It tends to increase the supply of
+commodities. It is not the satisfied people,
+nor the people who are content to go without,
+that make civilization go forward, but the unsatisfied
+ones, who want a lot of things they
+have not got, and get out and go after them
+and build railroads and factories and improve
+agriculture and invent machinery and multiply
+automobiles and take an interest in aeroplanes
+and try to accumulate money and keep it employed.</p>
+
+<p>“Are you doing all those things, Major?”
+said I.</p>
+
+<p>“Me? Oh no! I belong to the police. My
+job is to help to keep order and protect property.
+I never had one of the large-sized appetites for
+commodities—just food, clothes, shelter, money
+in the bank, and something to give away, and
+protection against rainy days, and enough to
+keep my wife and children off the Charity
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_56">[Pg 56]</span>Organization when I get run over by a motor-car—that’s
+all I want. You see, I’m a lazy
+man and like to read the newspaper and invite
+my soul, and everything I can’t get by working
+five or six hours a day I go without. Don’t
+take me for a pattern. I haven’t got the progress
+of civilization really at heart.”</p>
+
+<p>“The express-drivers help it on, I suppose,
+Major, when they strike for more pay?” They
+were striking at that time.</p>
+
+<p>“No doubt. All that should help distribution,
+provided the funds they are all striking
+to share exist in sufficient quantity. Distribution
+is next in importance to production.
+You’ve got to have something to distribute,
+and strikes are not immediately helpful to production,
+as you may have noticed, but the
+organization of labor ought to be helpful to
+distribution. Only nowadays when an important
+strike is won the cost of it is immediately
+shifted onto the general public by a gentle
+elevation of prices.”</p>
+
+<p>The Major is a lawyer and practises considerably
+as a trustee, and is doubtless more
+concerned with the philosophy of business than
+if his energies were enlisted in selling goods and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_57">[Pg 57]</span>wresting a profit out of it. “Mankind can be
+eased considerably in this earthly competition,”
+he went on, “by great increases of production,
+great extensions of agriculture and manufacturing
+and transportation, and great economies in
+all of them, provided that distribution fairly
+keeps pace with production.” It comes nearer
+to doing so, he thought, than all the exhorters
+and socialist people admit, because products
+have to find a market; but when it comes to
+that, this is a fairly roomy world, with many
+mouths and backs in it, and transportation is
+cheap and markets are world-wide, and goods
+as yet don’t necessarily pile up on any of us
+because there are a lot of them produced.</p>
+
+<p>And so the Major argued in effect that one
+way to help bring on the millennium was to
+increase the production and distribution of
+commodities. I suppose that <i>is</i> one way.
+There must be some connection between the
+millennium and civilization. The millennium
+isn’t going to swoop down on a world that has
+no meat in the house and where half the people
+live in trees. It is true that it was not a lack
+of commodities that drove Eve to eat the apple
+and brought on working for a living, and most
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_58">[Pg 58]</span>of us realize that man cannot live by bread
+alone, and that with binsful of commodities
+on every corner free for the taking the world
+would not be saved nor the folks in it satisfied
+and happy. What an interesting simplification
+of wants would happen in that case, and how
+quickly people would come to ascertain what
+they really needed and refuse to be loaded up
+with anything else! Still, there is a connection
+between human progress and wants and the
+commodities that appease them. A missionary’s
+daughter told me once about her father’s
+experience with the South-African blacks. Now
+and then he would make a convert, and always,
+if it was a thorough job, the convert would begin
+to reach out after civilization—some clothes,
+a bigger dwelling—presently, I dare say, a top-hat.
+It wasn’t all mere acquisitiveness, either,
+for some of the incidents of conversion were inconvenient,
+especially the troublesome domestic
+readjustment called for by the theory of the
+sufficiency of one wife. Of course, the millennium
+may swoop down and find us running
+about in skins or less, and living on roots, but
+I bet it won’t. It is much more likely to be
+welcomed by flocks of aeroplanes to an enormously
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_59">[Pg 59]</span>productive earth, worked for all it is
+worth by people intelligent enough to have
+abolished poverty and solved the problem of
+distribution.</p>
+
+<p>What does man want here below, anyway?
+Room and bath, food, clothes, a newspaper,
+and a job and fair opportunities to better himself.
+He has got the newspaper already. In
+this country, at least, there are enough newspapers
+to go around, and in the cities any one
+who declines to buy one can supply himself out
+of the first ash barrel. There is nothing so
+cheap as newspapers, and that is a consequence
+of the pressure of commodities on the market.
+The advertiser pays all but a cent’s worth of
+the cost of the newspaper, and would gladly
+pay that, no doubt, but for the fear of arousing
+the reader’s suspicions. How much this has
+to do with the fact that I hear of likely young
+men who come out of the nurseries of learning
+and look wistfully at the newspapers and fail
+to see attractive jobs on them and go away
+and do something else, I don’t know. It may be
+that likely young men never did troop in large
+swarms into newspapering. Banking usually
+looks better to them, because men get rich at
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_60">[Pg 60]</span>it, and law because a knowledge of it is no
+hindrance in any calling.</p>
+
+<p>The supply of rooms and baths is not so nearly
+equal to human needs as the supply of newspapers,
+but it is gaining on the population.
+Out there at the Peytons’ house, for example,
+it has caught up. In all the newer country
+houses hereabouts the great architectural feature
+is room and bath. In a Long Island house
+just completed that I inspected last spring
+before the family moved in there were between
+twenty and twenty-five bathrooms. There
+were three in the family, with a liability to
+guests if the owner’s wife ever succeeded in
+getting rested. I thought this marked a considerable
+forward stride in civilization. Church
+unity still hangs back a bit, but we are getting
+pretty strong on plumbing, and the millennium
+may find us with a bath apiece.</p>
+
+<p>The Peytons hadn’t so many bathrooms,
+because their house was not so large as the
+Long Island house, and they had to save part
+of it for clothed appearances; but they had
+many, and Cordelia and I admired them very
+much. Living in a six-hundred-dollar New
+York flat makes marvelously for the appreciation
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_61">[Pg 61]</span>of space, light, air, and running water.
+Of course the Peytons’ country house had all
+these blessings, and, besides, was delightfully
+fresh and clean and embellished with very
+pleasing adornments. “No doubt, Cordelia,”
+said I, “you might have had a set of things like
+this if you had shown a little timely judgment.”
+“Possibly;” said Cordelia; “this is a nice set,
+too. How many bathrooms shall <i>we</i> need,
+Peregrine?”</p>
+
+<p>“One—two—four—six; six will do us, I
+think, with a little management and a few
+extra sets of bath-robes and slippers. We
+don’t want to keep a plumber. To have more
+than a dozen makes a home too much like a
+hotel.”</p>
+
+<p>But there are a number of things that we
+shall want before we have even one house with
+even six bathrooms in it. I do not greatly
+covet a superfluity of bathrooms, though
+enough of them is one of the great luxuries of
+our time. Hot water is one of the leading
+valuables of life—one of the things that help
+to reconcile humanity to civilization and to
+offset its interference with such privileges as
+living out-of-doors and not having newspapers.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_62">[Pg 62]</span>That has long been appreciated. I believe the
+Greeks liked hot water and made provision to
+have it. Certainly the Romans liked it and
+went in strong for baths. The English have
+liked it and had it in fair quantity, along with
+daily deluges of cold water. We Americans
+delight in it and have more of it already, I
+suppose, than any people ever had before, and
+our supply is constantly increasing and constantly
+spreading from the cities to the country.
+It is cheap, as things go, and there is fair prospect
+that there will eventually be enough to
+go around. To have a universal supply of hot
+water and newspapers and a long start toward
+a universal supply of what we call education is
+doing not so ill as things go. I can wait for the
+six bathrooms, or even three. We have one
+now. One is a great blessing. I suppose it is
+our egotism that makes us more or less indifferent
+to what is not ours and cannot be for the
+present. What most of us want is the next
+thing—the thing almost within our reach. We
+don’t think about the things that are altogether
+beyond the scope of our fortunes. We do not
+covet them, nor are we jealous of our neighbors
+who have them, unless we conclude that we
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_63">[Pg 63]</span>have too little because they have too much.
+If the competition seems to us fair, we rather
+like to see prizes go to those who can win them,
+for a life with prizes in it for winners, even
+material prizes, looks richer and more attractive
+to most of us than a life planned on the
+principle of a division of the gate money among
+all who come in.</p>
+
+<p>Do you notice how strong the propensity is
+among all the fairly comfortable people to consider
+their own condition and their own standards
+as normal and truly desirable, and those
+of other folks, whether they have more or less,
+as a little off? I think that propensity is a
+wonderful provision for human happiness.
+We value, as a rule, what seems the best thing
+obtainable for ourselves. Whether it is abundance
+or a stimulating degree of privation, we
+incline to think it is a good thing for us and a
+better thing than other people have who have
+something different.</p>
+
+<p>“Cordelia,” said I, while we were talking
+about the bathroom, “you might have got a
+better set of things with some other man, but
+he would not have the experience or the discipline
+that I shall have by the time I have acquired
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_64">[Pg 64]</span>the set of things that you ought eventually
+to get with <i>me</i>.” There you are! We
+think we’re better off than the Peytons because
+we haven’t got so much as they have, and better
+off than the Goves because we’ve got more
+(mostly prospective) than they have. <i>We</i> are
+the standard. We laugh at ourselves, but surely
+it’s a fine thing to have so strong a bent toward
+toleration of things as they are, and expectation
+of being pleased with them as they’re
+going to be. I suppose it is just a different
+form of this same self-satisfaction that makes
+the teetotalers want to vote away everybody’s
+grog, and the college authorities insist that all
+the boys shall want to be high scholars like
+themselves, and the appeased women deprecate
+the agitations of the unappeased for woman’s
+suffrage.</p>
+
+<p>Probably Cordelia and I are exceptionally
+resigned to our condition; more so than the average
+of mankind. Yes, I suspect that is so, but
+I suspect also that it is only a provisional resignation.
+We reached out and got the next
+thing—each other. That was highly satisfactory
+and a good deal better than if we had
+waited for something else. But this reaching
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_65">[Pg 65]</span>out for the next thing seems to be a continuing
+process, and I suspect it has to go on till
+stopping-time, and that satisfaction in life is
+pretty closely geared to the ability to maintain
+it effectively. That is not altogether a soothing
+reflection, but I don’t know that it is desirable
+that all reflections should be soothing. A fair
+proportion of them ought to be stimulating.
+I observe that I read the writings of the efficient
+when my energies are high, and when they are
+low find solace in those of the lazy—only they
+must not be too lazy to write. Some of the very
+best writers were lazy, and struggled with it.
+Maybe it’s hard work to be a writer, but then
+it’s hard work to be <i>much</i> of anything. But
+that’s nothing! Nobody wastes sympathy, or
+ought to, on hard workers, provided they get
+in fair measure what they go out after. And
+one of the greatest things they get is increased
+ability to work hard. This is not entirely my
+discovery. It was suggested by an aged friend,
+but as far as I have experimented with it I
+think it is so. Of course, the suggestion was
+accompanied by a reminder in quotation-marks
+that life would be endurable except for its
+pleasures, but that’s not to be accepted too
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_66">[Pg 66]</span>confidently. It depends on the pleasures and
+whether they please or not. There are a lot
+of things that are labeled “pleasure,” and most
+of them are price-marked in more or less forbidding
+figures, but the considerable satisfactions
+of life seem to be conditions of the mind
+which may be related to living conditions that
+cost money, but which are not themselves price-marked
+in figures that are at all plain. There’s
+polo, a good, lively pleasure and fairly high-priced
+and consumptive also of time, but I
+judge the main value of active sports of that
+sort to aspiring men is indirect. They contribute
+to a physical efficiency which is useful just
+so far as it promotes mental efficiency—sanity
+and activity of mind, spontaneity of thought
+and speech and power. No doubt for some
+men sports are a form of discipline. They train
+some spirits to exertion, and make for energy
+and supply driving force for work, but, dear me,
+they take a lot of time and tend to consume
+more energy than they furnish. They are fine
+for boys, soldiers, Englishmen, and people with
+a disposition to grow fat, and an excellent vacation
+employment for some people, but I suspect
+there is an economic warrant for the disposition
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_67">[Pg 67]</span>of the common run of American adults to intrust
+the transaction of their active sports to
+persons who can give their whole time to them,
+and whose skilful exertions it is restful now and
+then to watch.</p>
+
+<p>I remember my classmate Hollaway saying
+one day of a group of sporty young gentlemen
+whom we were discussing, “The things that
+seem to amuse them would not give me pleasure.”
+That was true. Hollaway liked to
+<i>think</i>. That was the way he had most of his
+fun. He was willing to put in enough physical
+exertion to make his machinery run smoothly,
+and liked, as a rule, to do it quickly and have
+it over, but he got his fun out of what went on
+in his head, and in talk. He practised and enjoyed
+all the mental processes, observation,
+cogitation, consideration, reflection, rumination,
+imagination, and the rest, with resulting and
+accompanying discourse. Nobody around had
+more fun than Hollaway. Somebody said he
+had a “happy activity of the soul.” Maybe
+that is out of Emerson. I’ll ask Cordelia, who
+confesses to some acquaintance with Emerson.
+But, anyhow, the happy activity of the soul
+is good to have and not visibly price-marked
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_68">[Pg 68]</span>nor denied necessarily, like the opera and polo,
+to the impecunious.</p>
+
+<p>Going out to visit the Peytons was an enlivening
+change, and gave us new topics for
+discourse and reflection, but the best of it was
+to talk about it with Cordelia. I like the
+tranquillity of being married—married, that is,
+to Cordelia. Visiting the Peytons is a bit of
+embroidery on the fabric of life, but coming
+home to the flat and staying in all the evening
+and reading as many of the contemporary
+periodicals as I can manage to get hold of and
+get time to explore, and talking to Cordelia—that
+is the very web of life. I seldom have the
+sense of justification in life so strongly as in
+these domesticated discourses with Cordelia.
+I have got her to reading the contemporary
+periodicals and the newspapers and keeping
+some track of what is going on in the world.
+I don’t know what kind of radicals we will turn
+out to be if we keep our minds on that diet.
+But I get the other point of view down-town,
+where my employment is largely to assist my
+boss to help gentlemen with property to adjust
+the management of their concerns to laws contrived
+with intent to retard their processes of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_69">[Pg 69]</span>acquisition. It is nip and tuck in these days
+between the gentlemen who make the progressive
+political periodicals and the gentlemen
+who control the railroads and banks and trusts
+and their employees, to determine who is going
+to run the country. As things are, the country
+is run, after a fashion. The wheels do turn, and
+production and distribution are accomplished.
+To be sure, the wheels screech more or less, and
+the production is pretty wasteful compared with
+what the professional economists say it might
+be, and the stream of distribution runs so lumpy
+that it makes you laugh; but a fair proportion
+of the Lord’s will seems to be done, and hopeful
+people calculate that the proportion is increasing,
+though you might not always think so to
+read the progressive periodicals. A large part
+of the happy activity of nature consists of the
+big creatures eating the little ones, but we
+complain awfully about it when we think we
+see it going on in human society, and the law,
+whose humble but aspiring servant I am, was
+invented to check it. Everything that is invented
+to check that propensity tends to develop
+an appetite of its own. The law, the church,
+the walking delegate, all have in them the ingredients
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_70">[Pg 70]</span>of voracity, and I dare say the same
+ingredients are latent in the progressive periodicals.
+Who has the brains to govern will govern,
+and the mere substitution of lean masters
+for fat ones is not necessarily an advantage. I
+suppose it is largely our own consciousness of
+that that restrains us from taking the country
+away from the interests and giving it to the
+periodicals; and besides, of course, it is harder,
+because the interests hang on so to what is
+theirs, and the law, which is me, finds so many
+obstacles to detaching them.</p>
+
+<p>Well, practising law all day below Canal
+Street in the interest of the interests, and reading
+the progressive periodicals all the evening—there’s
+such a raft of them—in the interest of
+righteousness, altruism, and the people, ought
+to make me a very broad-minded person—so
+broad-minded probably that I shall lose sense
+of direction and fetch up in the driver’s place
+on a Brooklyn street-car.</p>
+
+<p>And yet probably not, with Cordelia as a
+partner. I have consulted her about going to
+the Assembly. Not that anybody wants me
+to go there, but it looks interesting. I wish my
+boss would employ me to go there and see that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_71">[Pg 71]</span>I did not starve. But he couldn’t very well.
+I would be a legislator in the employ of an
+employee of the interests, and all the fun would
+be gone. Father and Father-in-law might finance me,
+but neither of them is that much of
+a patriot. If I were employed by one of the
+periodicals there would be less scandal in that,
+but that’s not a practical thought. I dare say
+that I shall have to make considerably more
+progress in the practice of my profession before
+I can go to Albany, and by that time I shall
+have become too valuable to myself and dependent
+associates to be spared to go there.
+After all, I got married, and I suppose that is
+as fatal an indiscretion as a person of my attenuated
+means should permit himself at this
+stage of his endeavors. It is about politics
+very much as it is about getting married—if
+you wait till you’re ready, you can’t. It seems
+as if everything had to be shot on the wing.
+We ought to be governed by people of independent
+means. They are the only people who
+can afford the employment. But most people
+who have independent means have a point of
+view to match, and there you are—it isn’t quite
+the point of view of a large proportion of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_72">[Pg 72]</span>governed. Just so contradictory things are,
+and yet, after all, it’s that that makes the
+game.</p>
+
+<p>My, my! We have been married nearly a
+year, and have not yet repented. Our circumstances
+improve a little from month to
+month. Besides The Firm’s regular contribution
+to my maintenance, I pick up odd jobs
+now and then on my own account. Father and
+Father-in-law take occasional chances in the
+lottery of my accomplishments by sending me
+bits of business, and I pick up other bits from
+other people. I have even made literary compositions,
+and tried, not always fruitlessly, to
+sell them. That is a good enough game, if one
+dared give himself to it, but, except as compounded
+with politics, economics, or public
+service of some sort, it leads away from law,
+so I don’t follow it hard.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_73">[Pg 73]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="IV">
+    IV
+    <br>
+    THE BABY
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="upper-case">Undoubtedly</span> the baby makes a great
+difference. He fills up the flat, for one
+thing. I foresee that he will turn us out of it.
+Nevertheless he is valuable, and probably worth
+his space even in New York. His name is
+Samuel French. Cordelia named him after
+her father. She is extremely pleased with him.
+So is Matilda Finn, so is my mother, so is my
+mother-in-law. Even the trained assistant to
+nature who was here to welcome him seemed
+very pleased to meet Samuel, and both his
+grandfathers have been around to inspect him,
+and have approved and duly benefacted him.
+Neither of these aged but still profitable men
+has had a grandchild before, and they seem to
+like it. As for me, naturally I am like to burst
+with the pride at being associated, however
+humbly, with an achievement so important.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_74">[Pg 74]</span>Father-in-law is building a new room on to his
+summer palace in Connecticut, with a view, I
+think, to the more convenient entertainment
+of his new descendant, and I think that nothing
+but consideration for my fiscal incapacity
+withholds him from building Cordelia a country
+house. By various expedients I have swelled
+our sixty dollars a week to about seventy,
+which is a grateful gain, and appreciable in
+spite of the demands of the Post-office, the
+public transportation companies, the market-men,
+and the other agencies of depletion, so
+corroding to the fiscal being; but even—let
+me see, seven times fifty-two weeks—but even
+$3,640 is not an annual income that seems equal
+to the maintenance of two residences. I guess
+if we are to have a suburban home it must be
+an all-the-year-round home for the present,
+and father-in-law’s place in Connecticut is not
+just the right place for that. It is some miles
+from the station, and involves maintenance of
+horsepower of some sort, and of course that is
+unspeakable except as father-in-law provides
+it. Our lay would be a villa about the length
+of a baseball ground from the station, or,
+better still, something five cents from Wall
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_75">[Pg 75]</span>Street by tunnel or trolley, and you catch the
+car on the next corner.</p>
+
+<p>But think of the crowd on the car!</p>
+
+<p>No, I won’t think of it. It is the common
+lot hereabouts, and I should be able to stand
+my share of it, which I would not get in full,
+anyhow, because, being a lawyer, I can leave
+home a little later, and leave for home usually
+a little earlier or later than the great body of
+the workers for a living.</p>
+
+<p>My new responsibility has brought me a
+variety of new appreciations. As a parent I
+find I have new sentiments about parents, and
+increased esteem and regard for them as pillars
+that uphold life and direct it. Beyond doubt,
+they are fine for upholding grandchildren. No
+doubt there would be considerably more grandchildren
+in our world if there were more grandparents
+who recognized their responsibilities
+and made provision, as a matter of course, to
+meet them. But that does not accord with the
+lively individualism of our generation. Not
+only are we all desirous of independent life, but
+our parents prefer it for us. Accordingly, when
+we get above the social plane in which independent
+life for man and wife can be maintained
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_76">[Pg 76]</span>for twenty dollars a week, marriage is
+apt to come late. There are immense advantages
+about that social plane in which twenty
+dollars a week is a complete living, and the wife
+is cook and housemaid, wife, mother, and nurse
+all in one, and the state provides education, and
+the doctor adjusts his charges to your income,
+and all the man has to look after is food, clothes,
+shelter, and pocket money! I hope the people
+who are born with a call on that phase of existence
+appreciate their luck. To rise to the
+twenty-dollar-a-week phase must be full of
+satisfactions, but to drop to it is quite another
+matter. Whatever starting-point is dealt out
+to us, it is from that point that we have to go
+on, and, whether we like it or not, the point
+at which it behooves us to arrive is measured
+from the point at which we start.</p>
+
+<p>Raising babies must have been very much
+simplified by the invention of the kodak. There
+is no attitude, expression, sentiment, costume,
+or absence of costume of Samuel that this handy
+little instrument has not perpetuated. And
+inasmuch as Samuel varies and progresses from
+hour to hour, acquiring personality, weight, and
+accomplishments, changing in his features and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_77">[Pg 77]</span>developing new resemblances, the click of the
+kodak is almost as frequent in our flat as the
+whir of the sewing-machine. When infants
+had to run to the photographer’s for every new
+picture, I don’t see how they got their natural
+rest. You know they sleep about eighteen
+hours a day. One would think that with all
+that somnolence a baby would be no more
+trouble than a dormouse, but Samuel is almost
+a complete occupation. As an example of
+woman’s work he qualifies by being never done.
+When he is asleep he is about to waken, and
+when he is awake he is about to sleep, and either
+way he is either taking nourishment or about to
+take it, or taking a bath, or changing his clothes,
+or acquiring ideas, or taking first lessons in language.
+Since I have known him I sympathize
+with the woman who thought it just as easy
+to raise six children as one, because one took
+up all your time, and six couldn’t do more.</p>
+
+<p>I never saw Cordelia so much amused with
+anything, and I admit to being, myself, more
+diverted and entertained than I should have
+thought possible. I had a puppy once that was
+a delight, so cheerful, so prodigal of affectionate
+welcomes, and so incessant in his activities.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_78">[Pg 78]</span>Mother has got him now. She appropriated
+him—or he her—and kept him, she said, to
+remind her of me. But Samuel beats the
+puppy. He does not get around as briskly yet
+as the puppy did, but he has the same delight
+in very simple toys, and a similar liveliness of
+mind, and a like capacity to be pleased. He is
+quite a lot like that puppy as he was when I
+first got him.</p>
+
+<p>I didn’t need anything to increase my interest
+in getting home at night. Cordelia attended
+to that. But Samuel has increased it.
+He is awake when I get home, and, though he
+is usually getting ready to go to bed, he always
+expresses a flattering satisfaction at meeting
+me again, and has interesting details of progress
+to report, and smiles, and puts out arms, and
+makes inarticulate noises, and sits in my lap,
+and makes an inventory of my accessible
+properties.</p>
+
+<p>And, of course, there is a great deal to be
+told about him, including the day’s report of
+what has been said of him by admiring friends,
+and of the visits he has made and received,
+and, now and then, statistics of his weight and
+progress in intelligence and activity. I think
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_79">[Pg 79]</span>Cordelia talks to Matilda Finn and her various
+visitors about him all day, and then to me
+about him most of the evening. It is surprising
+that so small a carcass should afford so much
+discourse.</p>
+
+<p>We have entered him at a suitable school,
+which is perhaps another token of the incompleteness
+of my emancipation. You know
+that for some years past some of the boarding-schools
+have been so highly esteemed, for one
+reason or another, by unemancipated parents
+that they have coveted the privilege of having
+their sons go to them, and, to insure getting it,
+have entered their boys’ names at those schools
+as soon as they were born. So I entered Samuel
+at the school where I went myself. If that
+implied incompleteness of emancipation in me,
+I don’t care. Samuel must have his chance.
+It is enough for <i>me</i> to be emancipated. Emancipation
+is a personal affair, like conversion,
+and no one ought to try to force his emancipation
+on any one else, least of all a parent on a
+child. Samuel may prefer the old order, and
+by the time he grows up we may have the
+wherewithal to enable him to experiment with
+it if there is any of it left. I don’t know that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_80">[Pg 80]</span>there will be, and, to be sure, when did life
+offer a bigger or more uncertain speculation
+than this that Samuel yawns and gapes in the
+face of? Perhaps I ought not to call it uncertain,
+except as to times and means and details,
+but that’s enough; and as to those the
+uncertainty is ample. The great task that is
+doing now seems to be the improvement of the
+common lot. No doubt that is always going
+on when civilization is in its forward moods,
+but nowadays there is uncommon urgency about
+it, and remarkable command and handling of
+the progressive forces, and apparent enfeeblement
+of the powers of resistance. It is very
+attractive, very hopeful, but I suppose no
+thoughtful person denies that it is possible to
+improve the common lot so much and so fast
+as to force society into the hands of a receiver.
+That is one possibility that little Samuel is up
+against, and for that matter so are his parents;
+for the receivership may come, and reorganization
+after it, before Samuel is old enough to sit
+into the game.</p>
+
+<p>My! my! what will you see, little son? All
+the women voting, all the trades-unions joined
+under a single head, armies abolished, the immediate
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_81">[Pg 81]</span>will of majorities the supreme and only
+law, detachable marriage, detachable judges,
+detachable constitutions?</p>
+
+<p>You may, you may; and so may your parents,
+for that matter, and are as likely to, perhaps,
+as you are. But stay with us, none the less.
+There seems always to be good sport in this
+world for good sports—no matter what may
+be going on. Folks lived, and liked to live,
+hereabouts when the men walked between
+plow-handles with a rifle across their shoulders,
+and they can stand considerable variations in
+public habits without losing the appetite for
+life. An unchanging order is bound to grow
+tiresome, always did, always will; though outside
+of China it is hard to find one, and even
+there the old order is moving now. We must try
+to make a good sport of Samuel; one who will
+be interested in life no matter what, and, when
+new rules are making, have a say about them.</p>
+
+<p>I don’t see why I hang back so about votes
+for women. At times I think I am not opposed.
+I think I don’t care. But I read all
+the opposed discourse that has any sense in it
+with sympathy, and all the <i>pro</i> discourse in a
+critical spirit, rejoicing when it seems to me
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_82">[Pg 82]</span>unsound. It is true enough that there is no
+compelling reason why I should want votes
+for women. <i>My</i> proprietors don’t want them.
+Mother sniffs at them. Cordelia is observant,
+with very much such an instinctive leaning
+toward the <i>antis</i> as I have. Why should I
+excite myself about “equal suffrage” when my
+ladies like things better as they are? Aren’t
+mother and Cordelia representative women?
+A great deal more so, I think, than most of the
+suffragists. The mass of women hereabouts
+don’t seem to be concerned about voting. The
+suffragists in agitating to make them concerned
+seem to be trying to create an artificial want.
+They go about to persuade women that they
+are oppressed, and are rated politically with insane
+persons, criminals, and aliens.</p>
+
+<p>Now, what is all that? Is it progress, or is
+it mischief? Is it based on a mistaken conception
+of women’s job, or is it a natural detail of
+the redistribution of powers and privileges that
+appears to be going on? Am I opposed because
+I am a pig and a stand-patter and an old fogy?
+Are votes worth so much fuss, anyhow, and is
+it going to make any vital difference whether
+American women have them or not?</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_83">[Pg 83]</span></p>
+
+<p>I don’t know that it is. The women and the
+men are so inextricably bound together that it
+is inconceivable that with woman suffrage the
+vote should divide in proportions materially
+different from what happens now. But that’s
+not a reason for letting suffrage come. I do
+think that at present men and women do not
+long work together on the same level at the
+same tasks. Where women come in either
+they work under the direction of men or the
+men go out. The departments of life in which
+they rule—and there are plenty of them—are
+those in which men do not compete. I don’t
+think they can compete with men as voters or
+as organizers and directors of political government.
+If the suffragists get their votes for
+women, they will get an enlarged electorate
+controlled by men as now. And why should it
+be expected that the controlling men in that
+case will be better than they are now? Are
+the mass of women wiser, more honest, and better
+judges of men than the mass of men? I
+don’t think so. I think men and women are
+just mates. There seems to be a woman to
+match every man, but different from him, and
+a man to match almost every woman. It is
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_84">[Pg 84]</span>not sensible to compare a superior woman with
+an ordinary or inferior man, and point out that
+she is fitter to vote than he is. Of course she
+is, but that does not touch the real question,
+which is whether government will be better
+conducted with votes for all women than it is
+now.</p>
+
+<p>Those agitators talk about the “injustice”
+of depriving women of the ballot. They might
+as well talk of the injustice of the refusal of
+water to run uphill. There’s no injustice about
+it. It is nature. If it can be bettered, all right.
+Water will run uphill if there is enough pressure
+behind it. But if injustice has been done
+woman about her vote, it was done when she
+was born female and not male, and the appeal
+from that lies to the higher court.</p>
+
+<p>Was there any done? Take it by and large,
+is it a misfortune to born a girl and not a boy?
+That may happen to any of us any time we
+happen to be born. It’s a toss-up. It’s not
+the slightest credit to us to be born male, and
+certainly it should not be the slightest discredit
+to us to be born female; but according as we
+are born male or female we are born to different
+duties. If political government is one of the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_85">[Pg 85]</span>male duties, civilization will not get ahead by
+having men loosen their hold on it. For my
+part I suppose that down in the intricacies of
+my composition I have an instinctive conviction,
+or hunch, that political government is a
+male attribute, and that out of that comes my
+objection to abdicate, or even dilute, my share
+of it. Instinctive convictions have great weight
+in these matters, though the surface arguments
+they put out may be inadequate or mistaken,
+as the anti-suffrage arguments are so apt to be.
+The suffragist expounders demolish them, and
+think that they have accomplished something;
+but, alas! the demolition of puerile arguments
+leaves the question just where it was, with the
+pith of it still untouched. Still I think the
+agitation does good, bothering people like me,
+and making us think; asking us, What does belong
+to women, then, if not votes? How else
+are you going to give them equal life? What
+does justice demand for them if not the suffrage?</p>
+
+<p>If the males since the beginning of time have
+overestimated their importance and erred in
+regarding themselves as specialists in government,
+then it is only a matter of time when we
+shall be disabused of that error and shaken
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_86">[Pg 86]</span>down into our rightful places. But if government—meaning
+political government rather
+than domestic—really prospers better in the
+long run in the hands of males, in their hands
+it is likely to stay—the substance of it certainly,
+however that shadow we call a vote may flutter
+off, and wherever it may alight.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing happens without a cause. If the
+men are to be abased, doubtless it will be for
+their abundant sins. If they will not work as
+men should, they will lose their jobs. If they
+will not govern as men should, they will be
+governed. History is a record of the strong
+races subduing the weak, and the wise the foolish,
+to the end that strength and wisdom shall
+prevail in human affairs. In these days of
+Monroe doctrines and alliances and arbitration
+treaties those harsh processes seem to have
+been superseded. Is this invasion by women
+of the province of men a new expedient of
+Nature to preserve the competition that is
+essential to human progress?</p>
+
+<p>We cannot beat Nature. She is obdurate,
+resourceful, impossible to fool, with a trick to
+meet every trick that is offered her. She seems
+determined that man shall come to something
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_87">[Pg 87]</span>and plays man against man to make him better
+himself, and is probably equal, if occasion demands
+it, to play one half of him against the
+other. For of course that is what woman is—the
+other half of man. There cannot be a real
+competition between the two halves, for they
+are inseparably joined and have to pull each
+other along. But for all that, they are distinct
+individuals, and one in a given period may
+make faster progress than the other, with a
+good deal of disturbance of relations and equities
+and ideas. What man gets, woman gets; what
+woman gets, man gets. When woman gets
+education, liberty, opportunity, protection, the
+whole race gets those benefits.</p>
+
+<p>Then shall we say that when woman gets the
+vote the race is that much ahead? It may be,
+but to me it has not been so revealed up to
+these presents. Who gave man strength gave
+him dominion. If he loses dominion it will be
+because he has either misused his strength or
+lost it.</p>
+
+<p>Samuel has not lost his. He is truly a great
+power. As I have said, he is almost a complete
+occupation for his mother, and a profitable,
+satisfying occupation, too. I confess to fears
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_88">[Pg 88]</span>in time past that girls of Cordelia’s sort did
+not have enough to do to bring them their
+proper growth and keep them happy. If they
+didn’t go to college and didn’t marry as soon
+as they got out of school, they seemed to drift
+into a lot of occupations that looked rather
+futile, and like a mere provision for killing time.
+They played around, they visited, they dabbled
+in anything that came handy—dances, charities,
+house-parties, art, music, extra improvements
+for the mind—anything that could be cast into
+a void of time which should have ached, and
+doubtless did. It used to make me sorry for
+the girls because it seemed so hard for them to
+buckle down to anything remunerative and
+continuous and really get ahead in it. If they
+did that, they forfeited too many opportunities
+of the leisure class, to which it seems to be intended
+that the daughters of the well-to-do,
+from nineteen to about twenty-three, shall belong.
+If they went to college, that solved the
+problem for those years, but it came back at
+them as soon as they came out. If they were
+satisfied with their indefinite employments it
+was bad, and if they were not it was also bad.
+So I used to feel sorry for the girls because
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_89">[Pg 89]</span>their job looked to me so vague, and their
+employments so fragmentary and unpromising.</p>
+
+<p>I dare say I was wrong, and that the girls
+were working more hours at their proper vocation
+than I had the wit to recognize. I see it
+more clearly now; that there are fruits that
+ripen best in the sun, and should not be hurried
+in the process; that Cordelia did not really
+waste those years in which she waited for me
+to get started as a wage-earner, but learned in
+them a kind of patience and useful domestication,
+besides other accomplishments that make
+her better to live with now.</p>
+
+<p>Major Brace has paid us the compliment
+to look in and inspect Samuel. He expressed
+himself as pleased with him, and was very
+gratifying in the warmth of his congratulations
+to Cordelia and me. Speaking as a father of
+almost complete experience, he told me of the
+special enthusiasm he felt for a child that had
+never run up a dentist’s bill. Samuel hasn’t.
+There is little or nothing about him as yet that
+would interest a dentist; but Cordelia, whose
+forefinger is a good deal in his mouth, says
+there may be any minute.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_90">[Pg 90]</span></p>
+
+<p>I must ask mother if that is so. No doubt
+Cordelia’s enthusiasm is liable to mislead her.</p>
+
+<p>I believe Cordelia dislikes to spend money.
+I find her perpetually weighing something that
+might be had against its price, and deciding not
+to have it. Unless the purchasable object is
+indispensable or very positively desirable—like
+a kodak to snap at Samuel—the money looks
+better to her. That’s remarkable, isn’t it?
+People differ in temperament as well as in
+training about that, inheriting tighter or looser
+fists, I suppose, according to the forebear they
+individually trace back to. To me, now, things
+that I want always look better than what money
+I have. It makes me unhappy to spend <i>much</i>
+more than I have, but I enjoy very much
+spending what I have got. I never have any
+money ahead, unless you can see savings in
+life insurance, to which I make some inadequate
+pretense. Maybe that is a defect in my
+character, though accumulation on seventy dollars
+a week has its reluctances when you have
+a wife and baby and a cook and flat and all
+that. Still, if I had no elders to fall back on
+I’d have to pinch some salvage out of every
+dollar.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_91">[Pg 91]</span></p>
+
+<p>But Cordelia is naturally more retentive than
+I am. It is remarkable how little she cares,
+relatively, for things. She has a good many
+things, and has always been used to them. She
+likes them, but with an interest that is altogether
+secondary, preferring power, independence,
+and tranquillity of mind to objects of
+convenience or embellishment, and to almost
+everything else except health and an easy conscience.
+She has a private fortune—I don’t
+know that I have mentioned that—not large,
+but yielding sufficient income to buy her clothes.
+All girls ought to have private fortunes. Small
+ones will do: do better, perhaps, than larger
+ones, for I don’t suppose it is quite ideal to be
+swamped by your wife’s money. Cordelia gets
+a great deal of comfort out of hers, but I see
+her basis of expenditure is different from mine.
+Mine is adjusted to what I have; hers to what,
+on due reflection, she would rather have than
+money. On that basis she spends not only her
+own money, but mine. I dare say she will be
+a rich woman some day, and, I hope, still married
+to me; so there is a chance that, with other
+good luck, I may gather some surplus too. I
+believe she dislikes to shop; indeed, I have heard
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_92">[Pg 92]</span>her say so. There is a streak of Scotch in the
+Frenches, and I dare say it happened her way.
+My! my! What luck! When you think of
+the women—and men too, but especially women—whose
+highest happiness is to buy things and
+lug them home, it seems a marvelous dispensation
+that I should have acquired a companion
+of so opposite a sort. To be sure, no girl that
+was infatuated with the joys of purchase would
+have thought twice of me; and yet, who can
+tell, for I suppose there are girls who have
+neither self-restraint nor self-denial about anything,
+and are liable to think they must have
+something that really would not suit them at
+all? I have always thought that Rosamond
+Viney in <i>Middlemarch</i> was the most fatal character
+in literature. What must it be to be
+money-grubber for a woman like that, with an
+expensive appreciation of the material side of
+life and no conception of the rest of it! Stars
+above! how much better it is to be lucky than
+wise, especially in youth, when, as Major Brace
+assures me, none of us know anything. There
+was Solomon, who wrote the Proverbs, and
+Ben Franklin, who wrote Poor Richard; both
+able to make shrewd discourse by the ream,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_93">[Pg 93]</span>and neither of them fortunate on the domestic
+side. Probably it does not accord with the
+economy of nature that wise men should have
+wise wives; certainly if there is a scheme of
+things that is worthy of respect, it would not
+have fitted into it for me to have a foolish one.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_94">[Pg 94]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="V">
+    V
+    <br>
+    A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="upper-case">I remark</span> the disposition of contemporary
+American families to regulate their
+church-going by the inclination of the ladies.
+I suppose it will soon happen that Cordelia
+and I will go to church when Cordelia feels it
+to be desirable, and that when she stays at
+home it will look more profitable to me to stay
+at home with her. Although that means that
+we will go pretty regularly, it is not quite as it
+should be, any more than that I should go without
+my dinner when she has a failure of the
+appetite. But it seems apt to be so with contemporary
+Protestant people who get married.
+Even if the male has a previous habit of church-going,
+and convictions or preferences in favor
+of it, the woman is apt to be captain in that
+particular, and to assume command of the
+family conscience. That is an item in the contemporary
+slump of the male in the business of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_95">[Pg 95]</span>directing the course of life. He tries to keep a
+hand of his own on politics, but in the concerns
+of religion easily falls into the practice of looking
+to the woman to make his decisions and remind
+him of his practices. Which is feeble of
+him, for, as between religion and politics, religion
+is decidedly the more important, for it
+shapes and inspires and regulates the whole
+of life, politics included, whereas politics is no
+more than a detail.</p>
+
+<p>When I think of women and their needs and
+powers and rights, and their office in life—as I
+do a great deal nowadays, with Cordelia to observe
+and those suffragists prodding at the subject
+all the time—I have bursts of momentary
+conviction to the effect that if women go on
+assimilating four-fifths of the available religion
+and leaving nine-tenths of the alcohol and nearly
+all the tobacco to the men, they will govern
+our world before we know it. The Turks understand
+better. The male Turks make a specialty
+of piety, go without rum, and share tobacco
+liberally with their women; so to be a male
+Turk is still a relatively powerful condition,
+though I understand the Turkish ladies are
+restless nowadays, in spite of sweetmeats and
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_96">[Pg 96]</span>cigarettes, and are covetous of education, and
+suspect that there should be more coming to
+them than they are getting.</p>
+
+<p>Cordelia has intimated that that observation
+of mine about men having strength, and therefore
+dominion, is something of a bluff. She is
+too polite to contradict it, but not too polite
+to stir me to further reflections about it. Are
+men stronger? Have they dominion?</p>
+
+<p>There is no doubt that the average man we
+see about can hit harder than the average
+woman. He can also run faster and make
+better time up a tree, so that he seems to have
+the best of it, physically, both in offense and
+escape. If you come to translate these powers
+into practical contemporary factors he can
+usually earn more money at present than she
+can, and is much less vulnerable in the reputation.
+It may be argued that this superiority
+in male abilities is not the work of nature at
+all, but a consequence of male malignancy and
+oppression, and that if woman had a fair show
+to get her due development she could stand up
+to man when he put up his hooks, and run him
+down when he ran away. So Olive Schreiner
+seems to feel about it. Man’s power to make
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_97">[Pg 97]</span>more money than woman is challenged as an
+injustice. Perhaps it is an injustice in many
+cases. Perhaps our industrial system is not
+adjusted yet to women’s undomestic work in
+schools and factories and offices, and maybe
+the payroll will be revised in time in women’s
+favor. Still I think man’s superior money-making
+powers are of a piece with his power
+to hit harder and run faster. Money-getting
+seems to be more in the line of his natural job
+than of hers. He is less distracted from it by
+other leanings than she is. I guess he will always
+be the head money-getter, though very
+likely her claim on what he gets may come to
+rest even more on a basis of natural right than
+it does at present. It is a very much respected
+claim as it is, and supported by law and sentiment.</p>
+
+<p>Man is superior in some kinds of bodily
+strength, and apparently in some kinds of
+mental strength, too, but does it give him
+dominion? Some, I think. It seems to give
+him a good deal of dominion among savages,
+and less and less as civilization increases.
+Probably it would give him more if he were
+not inferior in some of the kinds of strength,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_98">[Pg 98]</span>and in some other respects that we are not used
+to classify as strength, but which offset it.
+There are war-powers and peace-powers. Admitting,
+in spite of Kipling’s she-bear poem,
+that man’s war-powers beat woman’s, how about
+peace-powers? Of course they are enormous.
+If she uses them for offense, she can spoil the
+man’s cake at any time. There is no living
+without women, and to be assigned to one of
+them and have her contrive that there shall
+be no living with her makes a serious dilemma.
+I have discussed this matter with our old friend
+Major Brace, and he has illuminated it with
+such wisdom as his great age (as he says) has
+enabled him to supply. “We can’t do anything,
+Peregrine,” he said, “but try our utmost [of
+course he really said damnedest] to make them
+happy, and hope that they will be good.” He
+told me a story about a house-painter he once
+knew in the country who had some ferrets.
+“I noticed when looking at the ferrets,” the
+Major said, “that he had a padlock on the
+place where he kept them, and he let me know,
+somehow, that he carried the key in his pocket
+and let nobody but himself meddle with them.
+I took note of that, because it seemed to me
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_99">[Pg 99]</span>that the ferrets being part of the domestic
+establishment, the natural way would have
+been to leave the key in the house when he was
+away and intrust the ferrets to his wife. But
+that was not his way, and I set him down in
+my mind as a believer in male dominion and
+an upholder of the authority of the head of the
+house. And, accordingly, when I heard about
+a year later that his wife had eloped with the
+butcher I wasn’t at all surprised. No doubt he
+had felt about her as he had about the ferrets—that
+she was his property. I heard that he
+was extremely put out when she ran away, and
+took it so much to heart that he left the village.
+I suppose he didn’t know any better,
+though of course it is possible that the woman
+was a fool and couldn’t be trusted. Her going
+off with the butcher implies a certain carelessness,
+though not necessarily a lack of intelligence.</p>
+
+<p>“You see, Peregrine, one measure of the liberty
+of women is the intelligence of man. And
+it works the other way round, too. A man who
+is intelligent enough to prefer a free woman for
+his companion will plan and take thought to
+have one; and a woman who is clever enough
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_100">[Pg 100]</span>to prefer a free man will take thought to keep
+her man free and still keep him. That’s what
+all decent people do nowadays who are passably
+wise, and I suppose it is what such people have
+been doing, not always, perhaps, but easily
+since the time of Adam. And I dare say the
+better-grade animals do the like.”</p>
+
+<p>I asked the Major if he thought Kipling was
+right about the she-bear and the superior offensiveness
+of females. He said he thought there
+was a good deal of meat in Kipling’s verses,
+and that few intelligent men came to be half
+a century old without having had to take
+thought of the intensity of the female disposition.
+“Somehow, Peregrine,” said he, “they
+seem to be a little nearer nature than we are.
+The primitive creature seems to survive in them
+a little more perceptibly than it does in us.
+And it is a very valuable survival—very valuable—and
+fit to receive the most respectful
+consideration, because, as Kipling intimates, it
+is a factor in the continuation of the race.
+When a man has a wise wife who loves him,
+as you and I have, Peregrine, it is his business
+to get the benefit of everything she has. All
+her strength as well as his is needed in their
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_101">[Pg 101]</span>common business. If he troubles her with his
+limitations, checks her initiative, and ignores
+her dissent, it is as bad for the common interest
+as when she does the like to him. He should
+attend to her risings-up and her sittings-down,
+and when at times the primitive creature rises
+up in her, his best procedure often is neither to
+run nor to try to rule the storm, but to sit down
+in the sand, wrap his burnoose around his head,
+and keep his face attentively to leeward until
+the gale blows out and calm re-eventuates.
+Then, in due time, she will dig him out again,
+if necessary, and he will have much less to unsay
+and repent of than if he had talked back.
+And usually, if he has been attentive, he will
+have learned something that it is valuable to
+know.</p>
+
+<p>“Lord love us,” went on the Major, “I hate
+subdued wives. I hate subdued husbands also,
+but subdued wives worse, if possible, because
+what subdues a wife is usually such an offensive
+combination of egotism and stupidity. And
+yet I know quite able men who bully their
+wives and have checked their wives’ development
+and diminished their abilities by doing
+so. It is a shocking waste, although it is to
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_102">[Pg 102]</span>admire the wives who bear it. That is apt to
+be the best thing they can do, under the circumstances.
+You see, in marriage that suggestion
+of Scripture about cutting off the right
+hand that offends has only limited application.
+Man or woman of us, when we have stood up
+in church and acquired a right hand of the opposite
+gender, we have need to go mighty slow
+about casting it from us. To read the divorce
+statistics, and about the growth of that practice
+in this country in the last twenty years, you’d
+think divorce was on the way to become a universal
+habit. But I guess it won’t. I guess
+when the ratio has reached a point where it
+provides duly for the irresponsible, intemperate,
+light-minded, and unfortunate, the increase
+will stop, and maybe, if civilization improves,
+the figures will begin to run the other way.
+That may seem optimistic, but I can’t think
+that woman’s extraordinary gift for living with
+man, and man’s surprising talent for getting
+along with woman, are going to perish or be
+wasted.”</p>
+
+<p class="p2">My coevals that I meet are still talking about
+football; not exclusively, of course, but with
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_103">[Pg 103]</span>perseverance and of a lively appearance of interest.
+Talking about it has some obvious
+advantages over playing it, but I never learned
+to be really expert in either. Cordelia and I
+saved quantities of money last fall staying away
+from football games. Also quite a lot in staying
+away from the great final series in professional
+baseball. Also time and strength on
+both of these items. If our circumstances had
+been four or five times as easy and Samuel
+could have spared us, we would have enriched
+our experience of contemporary life by taking
+in several of these contests. As studies in
+crowdology they are mighty good and leave
+permanent impressions behind them. And they
+are interesting socially and anthropologically.
+And sometimes they are pretty good as sport—the
+football games better, I think, than before
+the rules were changed. But as it was, it was
+a very easy economy for us. Cordelia said she
+had been to football games and didn’t believe
+there were any important new thrills left in
+them for her; and we read a lot about them in
+the papers and were content, though I don’t
+think football really makes first-class newspaper
+reading. I can’t follow the ball in type
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_104">[Pg 104]</span>even as well as from the seats, and I only get
+the score and the spectacular features. The
+worst of it is I cannot care inordinately who
+wins. Of course, the players do. They ought
+to. And so should the undergraduates and
+persons just emerged from that condition.
+But I don’t understand why such large masses
+of adult people contrive to care so much—if
+they really do—whether Harvard beats Yale,
+or either of them beats Princeton, or whether
+the Army or the Navy wins.</p>
+
+<p>I am getting deplorably careless in my feelings
+in this great subject. To be sure, when
+there is a big game I want to know how it has
+gone, and buy the latest evening paper and take
+it home and assimilate, and discuss a little, its
+disclosures about what the score was and why
+it was so. But however it turns out it doesn’t
+affect my appetite for dinner, nor my interest
+in food, and I can’t talk about it more than
+half an hour. And when the Sunday paper
+comes with all the details I am apt to get interested
+in other news and skip the football
+stories altogether, or until late at night.</p>
+
+<p>Really, I am ashamed. It comes, no doubt,
+with increase of years and the pressure of responsibilities
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_105">[Pg 105]</span>and concern about the more vital
+details of human existence. Cordelia reviles
+me and says I am getting older than my years.
+Maybe I am, mentally, though she is just about
+as much interested in football as I am, and no
+more. I suppose sport naturally falls into a
+secondary place in the thoughts of people who
+have a living to make and rent to pay and a
+child to raise. If everybody was like us, sport
+might languish, and that would be a pity. I’m
+glad they’re not. The Pharisee was not so far
+out, perhaps, in thanking God he was not like
+other men. The trouble was, he did not go
+on and thank God that other men were not like
+him. There needs to be great variety in the
+world if all the jobs are to get attention. I’m
+thankful that the prosperity of football does not
+depend on me, and that I can be bored by it
+without detriment to the great cause of sport,
+because, I suppose, it really is a great cause,
+and related to the perpetuation of vigor and
+virility in men.</p>
+
+<p class="p2">I have been thinking about celibates. There
+is something to be said for persons to whom
+celibacy comes natural. To most persons it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_106">[Pg 106]</span>does not come natural. It never did to me,
+for instance. I hate it when it is forced, and
+object with what may be a Protestant detestation
+to vows that bind people to it; but there
+are marvelously useful people in the ranks of
+the unmarried.</p>
+
+<p>Brookfield, a contemporary whose line is education,
+has been telling me a story about a rich
+man, named Thompson, who has got interested
+in the improvement of mankind. Somebody
+said the other day that the men who get rich
+are those who are able to get more out of other
+people than other people get out of them. That
+is a very plausible definition and good as far as
+it goes, but the story I heard made me realize
+that it doesn’t cover all the ground, and that
+many rich men are creators of wealth. This
+Thompson that I heard of had extraordinary
+brains for business. He could think to the
+bottom of propositions, and think out all their
+details and perceive whether they could be
+made profitable and how. He got at business
+almost as young as Alexander Hamilton, for his
+parents, who were good people, both died when
+he was fifteen and left him, as you might say,
+with his hat on, going out to look for means of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_107">[Pg 107]</span>support. He went to a big town and got a
+job with a good concern. At the end of three
+years he was ill, probably from overwork. His
+employer told him to go away and stay two
+months and get rested. He went, and stayed
+six weeks, and came back with the biggest
+bunch of orders that the firm had ever had.
+His employer saw then that he was incorrigible,
+and pretty soon he took him into partnership.</p>
+
+<p>Now there comes another likeness to Hamilton.
+The boy wanted to know more, and determined
+that when he had got money enough he
+would quit work and go off and study. He
+calculated that he would have a million dollars
+by the time he was twenty-six, and he
+thought that would do. He actually did get
+his million and something to spare at twenty-six
+(and this is not a newspaper story, either;
+Brookfield told it to me), and actually did pull
+out and go off to Europe and spent three years
+in France and Germany improving his mind.
+Now comes in his gift of celibacy, in which he
+was quite different from Hamilton—who never
+had any discernible talent that way—and from
+me. Instead of getting married and raising a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_108">[Pg 108]</span>family, and having a flower-garden and horses
+and cows—this being before they had invented
+automobiles—and enjoying life, he did not get
+married at all. I don’t know why not. Maybe
+he didn’t know how and was too old to learn;
+maybe somebody else persuaded the girl that
+he aspired to persuade. At any rate, he didn’t
+marry, but came home and made lots more
+money, and finally retired from active business
+and set his wits to see what he could do to make
+the world better. Now he lives on twelve or
+fifteen thousand a year, and spends most of his
+strength and his surplus income and more or
+less of his principal chiefly on one considerable
+enterprise that combines philanthropy and
+education. But he is dragged back into business
+now and then, Brookfield told me, when
+a commercial rescue job offers, that looks so
+difficult that nobody else will touch it.</p>
+
+<p>Of course, celibacy has no particular bearing
+on Thompson’s usefulness except that he was
+qualified to get along with it, and it left him
+entirely free to spend himself in trying to better
+the general conditions of life. It is not news
+that there are always some mighty useful
+bachelors about. Still less is it news that there
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_109">[Pg 109]</span>are many indispensable spinsters. I suppose
+the sentiment that everybody must get married
+and have four children has got some open seams
+in it; but a life is the thing that folks like best
+to leave in the world, and with reason, for, on
+the whole, a life, if it is good enough, lasts the
+best of anything, and leaves the most imperishable
+effects.</p>
+
+<p>It is too soon yet to say if my son Samuel is
+going to leave an imperishable effect in the
+world, but he is doing well, and the more perishable
+effects have already been found to be so
+little suited to him that one of his grandmothers
+has given him a modern rag-doll—an elegant
+creation that comes from a shop—and the other
+a teddy-bear. Teddy-bears are scarcer in the
+toy shops than they were, because the current
+of politics has rolled on, but they can still
+be had and may yet become more plentiful.
+Samuel lives a care-free life. In that respect
+he is an example and encouragement to us all.
+He assumes no responsibility about anything,
+takes his nourishment without turning a hair or
+sweating so much as one bead, and shows indifference
+to the primal curse. It is cheering and
+strengthening to have such a spirit in the family.</p>
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_110">[Pg 110]</span></p>
+
+<p>Ben Bowling, who came home with me to
+dinner the other night, has some of Samuel’s
+quality. Ben likes life and does not care what
+happens. I threatened him with universal
+prohibition and the total disappearance of potable
+grog from Christendom. He said it would
+never happen so, but if it did he didn’t care.
+He drank too much, anyhow, and if there was
+nothing to drink it would be good for his health
+and save him lots of money. I threatened him
+with woman suffrage. He refused even to object;
+said checkers was still checkers after all
+the pieces had got into the king-row, and as
+good a game as ever, though with differences
+of detail. I threatened him with stagnation
+of all industrial activity as the result of enforcing
+the Sherman law. He didn’t care; said
+he worked too hard, anyway, and needed a
+rest; could eat very simple food at a pinch;
+was too fat; was threatened with an unsuitable
+entanglement of the affections, and might escape
+the bag if the times were hard enough.
+Then we all talked about the Sherman law. I
+see in the papers that the consumption of
+alcoholic drinks in the United States last year
+was the greatest on record. No wonder, when
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_111">[Pg 111]</span>you think how much the Sherman law has been
+talked over: a dry subject on which you get
+no further and sink into despondency unless
+buoyed up. It is funny to see the sagacity of
+the country flunked, apparently, by that problem.
+What Ben and I agree on is so, and we
+agreed that the Sherman law, grinding out
+prosecutions and disorganizing business because
+public opinion could not settle on any plan to
+improve or amend it, was not unlike the silver-purchase
+law that kept loading silver into the
+Treasury and scaring off gold until Cleveland
+finally got it repealed. We did not agree that
+the Sherman law ought to be repealed, but did
+agree that it might elect the next President.
+Also that neither party was satisfied with any
+one who was running for nomination, though
+that is perhaps not an unusual condition when
+nomination is still five or six months off. But
+Ben did not care. He was attentive, interested,
+and amused, but hoped to stay aboard, no
+matter what the weather was, and help in
+navigation if his services were required. He
+and Samuel are reassuring.</p>
+
+<p>Another thing I find reassuring is the glimpses
+I get now and then of men who are at work
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_112">[Pg 112]</span>providing government for the country; especially
+unadvertised men whom few people ever
+hear of, who hold no office and aspire to none;
+whose pictures are never in the papers, nor their
+names in the reporter’s books or the mouths
+of the multitude. I heard the other day about
+one such person (Brookfield told me), a man of
+sufficient fortune—a million, I dare say—not
+a celibate like Thompson, but married and with
+a few children; a shrewd, experienced, thoughtful
+man, whose interest in life is and always
+has been politics, to handle the machinery of
+it and get the best results compatible with the
+material offered to pass laws and fill the offices,
+and the prejudices and mental disabilities of
+the voters. “I have known that man,” Brookfield
+said, “for eighteen years, and watched him
+play politics all that time; plan and direct;
+weigh men and choose between them; use their
+talents and abilities when they had them: put
+them in places where they belonged when he
+could; put in the next-best man when he
+couldn’t. He always played fair; always
+wanted the best man, the best law, and the
+best principle that he could see, and never
+wanted anything for himself except the fun of
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_113">[Pg 113]</span>playing the game. You couldn’t drive him
+into office. He never tried to make a penny
+out of legislation. The less he was seen and
+heard of the better he liked it, but he recognized
+politics as the great man’s game, and he liked
+to play it. No doubt the sense of power was
+pleasant to him, but his use of power was entirely
+conscientious, and the source of his power
+was never money, but the confidence that men
+had in his sagacity and his unselfishness. Back
+in him somewhere there was, of course, a sense
+of duty and a belief in certain principles of
+government, and a sort of unconscious consecration
+to the desire to see our experiment
+in government go well and to see the country
+prosper. But the immediate interest that kept
+his mind busy was just a delight in guiding the
+political affairs of men.”</p>
+
+<p>I dare say Brookfield’s man is an exceptional
+political boss; but I dare say, also, that in so
+far as we have, or ever have had, or will have,
+decent government, we owe it to somebody
+who has had a call to provide it for us, and has
+had the talents necessary to make his call
+effective. The rare thing about Brookfield’s
+man, as he described him, was his self-effacement
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_114">[Pg 114]</span>and superiority to vanity. He loved to
+play the game, but not only never thought of
+the gate money, but never cared to be a grandstand
+player. To do the job and do it well
+brought him the joy of a true artist in his art.
+As I said, I have felt encouraged about the
+future of politics in this country since I heard
+about him. If he had been a saint I wouldn’t
+have been so much encouraged, but Brookfield
+represented him as a mere human being, like
+any of us, looking about for things that interested
+his mind and made life taste good, and
+finding them supremely in politics. It is an
+encouragement to find that our politics is so
+good a game that folks with money and brains
+enough to experiment with pleasures will play
+at it purely for their inward satisfaction, and
+without attention even to the applause. Of
+course, men of that temperament and that high
+degree of sagacity and self-control are rare, but
+we have our share of men with an insight into
+cause and effect, and an understanding of the
+human mind both in the individual and in the
+crowd, and with ability to hear what is going
+on when they put their ears to the ground, and
+with a lively interest in human affairs that must
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_115">[Pg 115]</span>surely draw them into politics whenever they
+see that politics is a paramount interest. We
+have no picturesque Dukes of Devonshire
+drudging dutifully at government without
+vanity or political ambition, as fathers drudge
+for their families, and as Washington, maybe,
+drudged for us, but I believe we have a native
+product of our own that does like work, and
+quite as often with intelligence, because the
+work calls to them and because they not only
+feel the responsibilities of civilization, but find
+delight in undertaking them.</p>
+
+<p>And why not, to be sure! What else is there
+in life that is so fruitful in recompenses as a
+cheerful undertaking of the responsibilities of
+civilization? Mine are represented mainly, as
+yet, by Cordelia and Samuel, but I mean to
+undertake lots more. I see quantities of them
+about waiting to be undertaken. So does Cordelia,
+who is one of the most active and responsible
+of responsibilities, and, being less tied up
+to wage-earning than I am, gives more attention
+to putting props under civilization.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_116">[Pg 116]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="VI">
+    VI
+    <br>
+    POLITICS
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="upper-case">My</span> calling does not seem nowadays to inspire
+respect. Folks hoot at lawyers, declaring
+with much reiteration that law has ceased to
+be a profession and become a business. They
+vary that by pointing out that all the best
+talent in it is bought up day by day by the
+corporations and the rich. Even the judges—look
+at them! The current disposition is, when
+you don’t like a decision of a court, to take the
+judge’s number and write to the management
+to have him fired. It is to laugh at decisions
+and the feeling about them. The other day
+the United States Supreme Court decided something
+thus and so by four to three. Justices
+1, 3, and 5 protested vigorously. Personally I
+sustained the dissenting opinion, and thought
+the decision left the law in a bad condition.
+That could be cured by Congress, which is perhaps
+the best way, but the popular method
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_117">[Pg 117]</span>would be to dock Justices 2, 4, 6, and 7 a
+month’s pay, and try the case again with a full
+court. That’s how folks seem to feel, and perhaps
+some of them would act on their feelings.</p>
+
+<p><i>Some</i> of them! Stars above! What some
+of us would do is past guessing. What some
+of us are thought capable of doing quite outruns
+belief, but that is because the air is charged
+with politics and with plans and specifications
+for making over the world, and with a perceptible
+leaning, as I have intimated, toward beginning
+with the legal profession.</p>
+
+<p>Oh, well, let ’em! I’m not afraid. A man
+who can make a living by law can make a living
+at something else if necessary. It is the understanding
+when they put young fellows to learn
+the law that they will be qualified, more or less,
+if they learn it, not only to be lawyers, but to
+be bankers, brokers, railroad officers, editors, milliners,
+grocers, contractors, and nurses-general
+to ailing industries, and undertakers. Accordingly
+they usually appoint lawyers to
+receiverships, and usually the appointees go
+ahead and bury the patient. No doubt it is a
+natural consequence of this theory that lawyers
+shall know and do everybody’s business that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_118">[Pg 118]</span>there is this prevalence of impressions that
+everybody ought to be able to beat the lawyers
+at law. Of course there ought to be reciprocity
+in omniscience. Of course the lawyer trade can
+be overdone, but there’s more to it than these
+recall people think. I guess it will last my time.
+It’s the science of keeping order in the world.
+I admit that it needs assistance from cops and
+sometimes from soldiers, and cannon and warships,
+and that too much of the time it keeps a
+sort of crystallized disorder that has to be
+smashed occasionally and rearranged. But
+when it comes to rearrangement, back they
+come to the lawyers, professors of the science
+of keeping order in the world.</p>
+
+<p>It is interesting how people divide in politics.
+All the decent people seem to be after the same
+thing, more or less, but differ according to
+knowledge, temperament, circumstances, and
+affiliations as to methods of getting it. And the
+differences last so wonderfully! There’s free
+trade and protection, or high and low protection—we’ve
+been discussing those matters in this
+country voluminously and insistently for from
+fifty to a hundred years, and by far the most
+of us don’t know now precisely where we stand.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</span>We are, reasonably enough, for as much improvement
+as will do us good, and not for any
+more than is helpful at the price. But tariff-improvement
+isn’t to be had in quarter-yard
+lengths. Congress makes a rough effort to
+please customers, and when it has finished it
+is take it or leave it, and the customers usually
+go off grumbling.</p>
+
+<p>And the other things that people want—restraint
+of corporations, restraint of labor-unions,
+restraint of political bosses, changes in the
+machinery of politics, hand-made government
+by the people, single taxes, income taxes,
+minimum wages, municipal ownership of public
+utilities, votes for women—my gracious—there’s
+a new remedy every day.</p>
+
+<p>Not but that many of them are good and
+some of them timely. The world seems to be
+progressive nowadays, and I suppose its progress
+is upward, and not to the bow-wows. But
+it is to wonder about every proposed change
+whether it is really improvement or merely
+change, and about every novelty that people
+clamor for whether their true need is not something
+else—a change in themselves, rather than
+any practicable change in the regulations of life.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</span>For one need not be very old to observe that
+different people make out very differently in
+the same circumstances, and that folks affect
+circumstances much more than circumstances
+affect folks. Yet circumstances do affect folks
+very much, crush them sometimes, and stunt
+or warp them often; and certainly there is an
+obligation in the folks who have it in them to
+affect circumstances to improve them for the
+benefit of all hands, and provide reasonable
+access to opportunity.</p>
+
+<p>Do I get in with the cart-tail orators this
+campaign? Why not, to be sure? Politics has
+been an early crop this year, sprouting hard in
+March, and working overtime ever since, with
+an enormous profusion of discourse and a vast
+expenditure of time and money in a general
+public effort to get somewhere. But that’s all
+right. The crop is going to be worth the labor.
+This is really the first time the political school
+has been run wide open since Bryan’s first campaign,
+and that was sixteen years ago, a period
+that carries me clear back to Eton collars. Alas
+for me! I suppose I’m a sort of conservative.
+They ought to examine the blood and find out
+where people belong, and save us some of our
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</span>mental struggles to discover it by cerebral
+analysis. I don’t know what’s in my blood,
+but when people are for scuttling the ship so
+as to get the boats out easier I always seem to
+be for some other plan. Now and then it’s
+necessary to scuttle. There was the everlasting
+French Revolution, where they blew up
+their ship, and in the long run made a good
+thing out of it. But that was an exceptionally
+rotten ship, and they had things fixed aboard
+so that the crew were too successfully separated
+from the grub—a feat that a large share of
+human ability seems always at work to accomplish,
+and which, when it is successfully pulled
+off, achieves a very penetrating and comprehensive
+quality of ruin. Perhaps it is the conservative
+molecules in my blood that makes me
+as much adverse to this detachment of the crew
+from the grub as I am to blowing up the ship.
+No true friend of navigation wants either of
+them.</p>
+
+<p>I guess it’s more fun to be a meat-ax radical
+than a conservative. The ax-handle is a simple
+implement, and probably blisters the hands less
+than this eternal pulling on the sheets and
+throwing the wheel over. But we don’t really
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</span>choose our line in politics. We take the steer
+we get from our inside, and which comes down
+to us, no doubt, from our forebears, along with
+the tendency to fat or lean, and variations in
+the adherence of hairs to our scalps. I dare
+say we are not as grateful as we should be to
+other persons whose molecular inheritance is
+different from ours for going their way and following
+their hereditary propensities, so that
+we can better and more helpfully follow ours.
+If we all got the same steer I dare say the ship
+would run aground. To avoid that there comes
+this variety of propensity, and also the great
+principle of reaction on inherited inclinations,
+which has always raised up from time to time
+such valuable and efficient revolutionaries.
+The pinch for the natural conservatives comes
+at times when conservatism has outrun its
+license and crystallized into a do-nothingness
+which is more dangerous than radicalism. Then
+the real conservatives like me, who always want
+to let things down easy, have to flop, and it is
+always a very nice matter to know just when
+to do it and what to flop to.</p>
+
+<p>This is a pretty floppy year, no doubt about
+it. I’d give a penny to know whose cart-tail, if
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</span>any, I should aspire to mount. Great din at
+this writing, and a handsome field of candidates,
+with leaders whom we have been contemplating
+for months, and putting on the scales and pulling
+off, and whose points we have reckoned and
+re-reckoned. And as it comes to the choice,
+how prevalent is dubiety of mind as to whether
+we shall get candidates for whom we want to
+vote! Was there ever such a lot of men put
+up for office? I read the papers, all varieties
+of them, and have been studying candidates
+hard now for three or four months, and begin
+to wonder how so many incompetent or unprincipled
+citizens have contrived to cheat the
+gallows and avoid all places of detention all
+these years. Not one of them has so much as
+been to jail as yet. I dare say they would pass
+even now as half-way decent men if they were
+not candidates. Perhaps we are too particular.
+I notice that a large proportion of the important
+work in the world has been done by pretty
+bad men: men, some of them, who would have
+been insufferable if they had not been indispensable.
+When things are in a bad-enough
+hole, the indispensable man has to be taken
+whether he is insufferable or not. But luckily
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</span>we’re not up against it so hard as that. Nobody
+seems indispensable this year. Our world
+seems to me less tippy nowadays, blowing as it
+is at all its blow-holes, than it did six or seven
+years ago, when stocks were kiting and being
+kited, and everybody was consolidating, and
+every active person who wasn’t a syndicate or
+an underwriter of something was asking the
+way to those fashionable employments. We
+have blown off a lot of steam since then, and
+our safety-valves are all working pretty well;
+and, though they’re noisy, to me they don’t
+look dangerous. We must be patient with the
+candidates, and look sometimes on their bright
+sides. When we regard them all with discontent,
+it is too much like that common saying,
+“Why do women marry such men?” They
+marry the best in sight, and that’s all we can
+do about candidates. But, by George! the
+light that beats upon a throne is mere moonshine
+to the light that beats upon a candidate.</p>
+
+<p>We shall see about the candidates, but just
+what we shall see beats me.</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="VII">
+    VII
+    <br>
+    WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="upper-case">We</span> want to ask people to dinner—at least
+<i>I</i> do—and do ask a good many, first and
+last, in spite of restricted space and our other
+restrictions. About four besides ourselves is
+our limit, and that’s a dinner-party. More
+often I bring home a man, or a married pair
+of our generation come in and bring new topics
+and points of view, and sometimes news, into
+our discourse. People seem willing enough to
+come to dinner if you have something to eat
+in the house and something to say. I sometimes
+wish we had more dinner-parties, but the doctrine
+of compensation comes in on that, for, I
+suppose, if we were rich enough to have people
+to dinner whenever we wanted, we would have
+to dine out the rest of the time, and the upshot
+of it would be that we would never have
+time to read up anything really good to say.
+But we do dine out considerably as it is, not
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</span>only with our cherished relatives who regale
+us when occasion offers (and also when it
+doesn’t) with meat, drink, and affection, but
+also with our friends, both those who live somewhat
+near our economic plane and those who
+move and have beings in planes much more
+exalted and profuse.</p>
+
+<p>For example, we dine sometimes with Major
+and Mrs. Brace, indulgent elders of whom I
+have so often spoken, and who, I think, are disposed
+to assume some restricted but affectionate
+responsibility for our successful progress
+through this vale of dues. We are on such
+terms with that family that Mrs. Brace has a
+habit of telephoning to Cordelia please to come
+and fill in at a dinner-party when a pair of
+guests give out at the last moment, which we
+do, when we can, with cheerfulness of spirit.
+Then the Major bestows little jobs of law business
+on me from time to time, and is apt to say
+“Come to dinner, and talk it over, and fetch
+Cordelia.” And then we talk other things over
+also, and maybe play auction bridge for an
+hour.</p>
+
+<p>The last one of Mrs. Brace’s dinners we filled
+in at was unusually well stocked with persons
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</span>apt at discussion, and the talk took a turn
+toward the education of women, and more particularly
+the education of daughters of well-to-do
+parents in New York. On the general
+subject I don’t see that there is much to discuss.
+The prevailing practice is to teach girls
+up to eighteen or nineteen years of age anything
+that they will consent to learn, the same
+as boys. The girls don’t go to college yet as
+generally as the boys do, but they go a good
+deal, and more and more, I should say, all the
+time. The girls’ colleges prosper and increase
+in number and in size, but the authorities seem
+to feel that they have not yet fully struck their
+gait; not yet established themselves as the
+best places for girls in general between eighteen
+and twenty-two, and not yet demonstrated to
+the satisfaction of all the observant and considerate
+that the training they give fulfils its
+aim, and is better worth the time of girls who
+acquire it or might acquire it than some other
+things that some of them are or might be doing
+in those four years, if they were not doing that.</p>
+
+<p>You may say that the same reluctance of
+unrestricted approval attaches to the boys’
+colleges. There was the New Haven lady who
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</span>felt so strongly that Yale was one of the more
+popular gates of hell, and the late Mr. Crane,
+of Chicago, who maintained that our whole
+system of college education was pernicious and
+a shocking waste of time, and Dr. Wilson, late
+of Princeton, who felt so strongly that the
+college side-shows, athletic and social, had diverted
+to themselves the stronger currents of
+young life, to the great detriment of the academic
+performance in the main tent, and who
+did what he could to bring them back. Certainly
+the boys’ colleges are imperfect enough,
+and are conceded both by their friends and their
+detractors to be so, but at least they have won
+in the competition with home training. As a
+rule, the boys who can, go to college. They
+may not get there what they should, but they
+are not kept at home and put into business, or
+brought out into society, for fear that what
+they may miss by not staying at home will be
+more valuable than what they may gain by
+being in college. All sorts of boys go to college;
+the rich and the poor, the fashionable and the
+simple; the boys with a living to scramble for,
+and those with cotton-wadded places and ready-made
+incomes waiting for them. It is felt
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</span>that boys must know one another if they know
+nothing else, and that college is a good place
+to get that knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>So it is felt about girls, that they must know
+one another, and also boys, if nothing else, but
+college is not yet the place where the more
+modish girls in the biggest cities can know the
+girls whom it belongs to them to know. The
+American girls from the big cities who are
+advantageously situated for experiments in
+polite society do not yet go much to college.
+Their brothers go as matter of course. Their
+brothers, like as not, are sent five or six years
+to boarding-school, and then three or four
+years to college, and then perhaps kept away
+several years longer learning the rudiments of
+some profession in which they start to work
+at twenty-five or later. But to keep the girls
+off in institutions away from their mothers,
+until they reach so ripe an age as that, or even
+the maturity of twenty-two, is an experiment
+that affectionate parents who have social aspirations
+for their daughters, and some means
+of furthering them, are apt to look upon with
+hostility, doubt, or, at best, with grudging and
+uncertain approval. The mass of the college
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_130">[Pg 130]</span>girls seems to be recruited from the lesser cities,
+or from families whose daughters have a doubtful
+prospect, or worse, of inheriting means of
+support, and must, as a matter of common
+prudence, be qualified betimes for self-maintenance
+and all the kinds of self-help, against a
+turn of fortune that may leave them without
+a competent wage-earner to depend on.</p>
+
+<p>These considerations all got due attention
+at Mrs. Brace’s dinner-party. “Send Maria
+to college?” exclaimed Mrs. Van Pelt. “What
+for? She’s eighteen, and has been to school
+as it is ever since she was four years old, and to
+boarding-school three years, and knows an enormous
+amount, and can read and spell fairly,
+speak some French, and read German, and
+knows the English kings, and a few of the
+Presidents, and whether Dryden or Milton
+wrote the ‘Fairy Queen.’ Mercy! The child’s
+crammed with knowledge; what she needs to
+know is how to use some of it. She can’t talk
+at a dinner-party. I want her to learn to talk.
+I want her to have an acquaintance. It won’t
+hurt her to inspect the young gentlemen. The
+colleges are nunneries, full of nuns whose
+mothers I don’t know, busy learning unimportant
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</span>things like how to cut up frogs, and the
+pedigrees of the Saxon kings, and eschatology,
+and neglecting all the important things like how
+to put on a hat, how to cut up a lobster, how to
+keep hair attached to the scalp, how to talk to
+a boy, how to help a mother, how to engage a
+cook, whom to ask to a dinner-party. Why
+college? Maria’d come home in four years,
+forgotten by all the girls she ought to know,
+qualified to be a school-teacher and with a large
+acquaintance among young ladies similarly
+qualified, and with a strong and reasonable
+impulse to put her acquirements to practical
+use either by continuing her studies or getting
+a situation and earning her living. I don’t
+want her to get a situation and earn her living,
+I want her to get married.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh, come!” said the Major, who was sitting
+next to her. “It isn’t so bad as that. I know
+Maria. She’ll get married anyhow, but give
+her time. Does she want to go to college?”</p>
+
+<p>“She could have gone. She knew enough
+when she got out of school. She passed the
+examinations, and she thought about it more
+or less. But finally she came out instead.
+She may go yet. I don’t know. She still talks
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</span>to her father about it, and meanwhile she takes
+courses with learned women about art and such
+things, and does something at music. And she
+goes to dances a little, and dines out a little,
+and slums a little, and organizes charity a
+little.”</p>
+
+<p>“Does she play with the boys?”</p>
+
+<p>“A very little. The young men don’t seem
+to be the absorbing interest they were when I
+was young. But I suppose that is more a
+change in human nature. New York has come
+to be a good deal of a street-car, with people
+crowding in and out all the time, and the conductor
+perpetually calling out, ‘Please move
+up there in front!’ Girls and young men don’t
+meet here familiarly any more. I don’t know
+how they ever see enough of one another to get
+married unless they meet in the summer somewhere.
+New York girls seem mostly to marry
+men they meet on steamers, nowadays.”</p>
+
+<p>“I understand,” said the Major, “that our
+population is now divided into those who travel
+and those who stay at home. Those who travel
+meet, especially on steamers where they are
+cooped up together with a week of idle time on
+their hands and are liable to develop mutual
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</span>appreciations. Those who don’t travel also
+meet more or less, and some of them seem to
+marry. There were you and Cordelia, Peregrine;
+you were not a traveler, yet you got
+married somehow.”</p>
+
+<p>“Oh yes,” said I. “I had to. There was
+nothing else that I wanted to do that was compatible
+with earning a living. I never traveled.
+I never could; but Cordelia traveled plenty.”</p>
+
+<p>“To be sure,” put in Mrs. Van Pelt, “they
+can travel if they don’t go to college. It doesn’t
+cost much more, and they have the time. And
+they do travel. Also they visit about with
+their school friends, and find their way about
+Boston and Philadelphia and Washington and
+other places more civilized than this, and I have
+known of girls who went to visit in St. Louis,
+Chicago, and St. Paul, which was interesting
+and enlarging to the mind, though not so necessary
+perhaps as though we did not have the
+finished products of those cities brought daily
+to our doors, and could not inspect them and
+the rest of the United States any day on Fifth
+Avenue, or by walking through the Waldorf-Astoria
+or the Plaza Hotel, or at home, or out
+at dinner—and I beg you to recognize, Mrs.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</span>Lamson, that I remember that we borrowed
+you from Seattle, and you and your husband,
+Mrs. Butler, from Buffalo, and that I, who was
+brought here from Baltimore, speak humbly
+and with great respect of all our Western cities.
+But send your girl to college, and then she is
+like a butterfly pinned to a card. Can’t visit,
+can’t travel, can’t beguile her father, can’t console
+her mother, can’t take her brother to dances,
+can’t pay calls, lost to earth, learning the family
+connections of mollusks—what is a mollusk?—and
+the other unusable things that erudite people
+have put into tiresome books. And yet I
+don’t doubt that Maria’s father will send her
+to college if she wants to go.”</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Van Pelt, farther down the table, seeing
+that his wife had the floor, had lent an ear to
+her deliverance. “Well,” said he, “what can
+you do? Four years is only four years, and a
+girl in these days can afford to spend it in
+getting something definite and lasting, if only
+she gets it. I only know this game of being a
+girl by observation. I have never played at it.
+But my wife knows it as a player, and what she
+perceives in it by experience and instinct always
+outweighs my theories in my own judgment.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</span>She decides these matters except in so far as
+Maria decides them for herself, which is a good
+ways. My wife is uncertain about the good of
+girls’ colleges because she never went to one.
+They’re very new. They didn’t prevail so
+much in her educational period as they do now.
+They must be excellent for girls whose mothers
+are desperate or frivolous characters, from
+whom they need to be separated. All the institutions
+are valuable in separating children
+with possibilities from impossible parents. But
+where the parents are not impossible, of course
+the separation involves loss. We feel as to
+boys that the gain pretty certainly counterbalances
+it. But we feel that girls do well to
+form the habit of living at home, which is something
+that takes practice, and even prayers,
+if you’re going to do it as you should. If Maria
+goes to college, I’m for having her sleep at home,
+where I can see her at dinner. Though whether
+that’s right or not, I don’t know. I don’t expect
+to give Maria more than a very imperfect
+steer in this life anyhow. That’s all I got; all
+my wife got; all my father and mother got.
+But I don’t mind taking a chance if it looks
+good, and the fact that college does not fit conveniently
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</span>into the social machinery that has
+been devised for the development of girls in New
+York does not appall me. The machinery exists
+for the benefit of the girls, not the girls for the
+machinery. What we are after is to train fine
+women. You don’t do it by wholesale processes.
+It is hard work, anyhow, and what suits one
+doesn’t suit another. It is with a girl, I take it,
+as it is with a boy. The facts they get in college
+they mostly lose, but the minds of some
+of them expand in the process of getting facts,
+and gain scope and power, and the ability to
+understand things, and increased interest in
+life, and capacity. Any way, so that the girls
+get their own.”</p>
+
+<p>“If we’ve all got to vote presently,” said Mrs.
+Brace, “no doubt the girls will have to go to
+college. I’m told we’re not constitutional in
+our political remedies.”</p>
+
+<p>“As to votes,” said the Major, “it’s a case
+of half-knowledge is a dangerous thing. The
+most able women that I happen to know, the
+most thoroughly trained and schooled in hard
+mental work, those that seem to me the deepest
+thinkers, don’t want votes for women. Of
+course college at its best is only a step, but it
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</span>is a step toward sound thinking. I should be
+inclined to argue that college for a girl was a
+step toward giving her such a grasp upon human
+affairs and the conditions of life as would incline
+her to leave votes where they are, and spend
+her strength in other forms of expression. So
+if Maria sends herself to college, Van Pelt, it
+may be a process in the making of a really
+able anti-suffragist who will understand herself,
+and other women and men, and can sift
+the chaff out of an argument. If the suffragists
+are to be beaten they will be beaten by the rest
+of women—those who have found their vocation
+and are happy in it, those who are busy,
+at least, whether happy or not, and cannot be
+harangued into excitement about politics, and
+those of first-rate mental powers and deep experience,
+who can turn the whole matter over
+in their minds and conclude that woman suffrage
+would not help society. At any rate,
+woman suffrage or not, the way out lies in the
+direction of more power in the human mind,
+male and female, and not in less.”</p>
+
+<p>We males continued to discuss this subject
+when the ladies had gone out and we went into
+the Major’s library to burn tobacco. They
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</span>set upon me as the latest transplantation from
+the college nursery into the garden of actual
+life, and demanded to know what I had got
+out of college. I said that for one thing I had
+got an acquaintance with several hundred men
+of about my own age, a good many of them
+now living in New York and the rest scattered
+variously about the country. Some of these
+men I knew intimately. All of them I knew
+well enough to have views about their qualities,
+and what I knew of them helped me to know
+other men, and gave me a measure which helped
+me to estimate men in general. I said that the
+way to know pictures was to be where you could
+see pictures, that the way to know men was,
+doubtless, to live with them and look them
+over, and that college—a big college—was a
+very convenient place to view a collection of
+young men, and learn to know the species. I
+said I didn’t think any other thing we got in
+college was so important as that, because the
+other things you might learn in a big college
+could be learned anywhere if you took the necessary
+time and put in the necessary work.
+But the beauty about college was that you
+had the time there to add to knowledge in all
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</span>the ways, to learn the men and also to inspect
+the books and examine the mental secretions
+of the professors, and that with reasonable
+gumption and diligence you could do
+it all. As to that end of it I quoted Tomlinson,
+who dined with us the other night. He is a
+still more recent college product than I am, and
+is still immersed in law studies. We got to talking
+college and what we thought it had done for
+us, and he said, as I remember, that he could
+hardly recall a fact that he had learned in college,
+but still he thought he had got great good
+out of it. When he was an undergraduate, he
+said, he was interested mostly in history, government,
+and economics. When he got out, his
+tastes entirely changed, and he got interested
+in literature and philosophy. “Nowadays,” said
+he, “I look forward to Sunday with the utmost
+impatience, and when it comes round I put it
+in with Spencer, Huxley, and Emerson. I am
+getting to be an authority on biology, I tell
+you, and wrestle with <i>First Principles</i> in a way
+to make my law-books jealous.”</p>
+
+<p>They were quite interested in Tomlinson.
+The Major said he loved to see a boy come out
+of college with a desire to know something.
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</span>“Now that boy,” said he, “is really interested
+in what is going on, and wants to know why.
+It’s delightful. He’s got the inquiring mind,
+and, you see, college has developed it. Perhaps
+it would have developed anyhow, but at
+least the environment was favorable. It’s a
+mighty inquisitive mind that develops on general
+lines if it is put hard into the game of
+money-grubbing at seventeen. And I don’t
+know that the game of ‘society’ is so much
+better for girls, though it is better in this:
+that its more strenuous phase doesn’t last
+long, and after that a girl who has not yet
+formed an attachment has a great deal more
+leisure than a boy who is tied up to a job.
+We should recognize that ‘society’ is intended
+to give to girls that acquaintance with people,
+and the opportunities to observe them and
+handle them, that Jesup, here, values so much
+in college. Only ‘society’ does not include the
+systematic cultivation of recorded knowledge
+which the colleges still exact. If your Maria,
+now, Van Pelt, could supplement her social
+experiments with such fruits of college learning
+as that young Tomlinson reports, she’d be
+ahead on it. Don’t you think so? She’d be
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</span>a more interesting woman, and have a livelier
+interest in life, and take hold of things more
+intelligently, and put in her spare time to better
+purpose, and have more fun. It is a great thing,
+it really is a great thing, to get the young
+started up the tree of knowledge; to get them
+to want to know, and start them climbing.”</p>
+
+<p>“I agree with you, Major,” said Mr. Van
+Pelt. “I quite agree with you. But Tomlinson’s
+a boy and Maria’s a girl. Is that going
+to make a difference? Evidently Tomlinson’s
+not going to let the trees obstruct his view of
+the forest. He seems to be after knowledge
+because it will help him to understand life.
+That’s all the good there is in knowledge. Now
+I see women who seem to claw after knowledge
+as though it were a sunburst, or some such embellishment
+that adorned them to good purpose.
+I see their minds caked up with it, so
+that they don’t work well. Some of the learned
+ladies are tiresome, just as some of the learned
+men are. They are not tiresome because they
+know too much, but because they lack the instinct
+that should tell them how to be interesting.
+You know a lively retail shop with a good
+show-window is always more interesting than
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</span>a storage warehouse, no matter what treasures
+the warehouse may contain. I was saying the
+other day that Mrs. Jameson, the professor’s
+wife, was such a charming lady, and a very
+accomplished woman who heard me, said, ‘Oh
+yes; but she doesn’t know English literature.’
+What odds whether she knows English literature
+or not if she is a charming lady? As much
+English literature as will make her lovelier and
+better able to express herself and more interesting
+and wiser is a good thing, and more than
+that is of very secondary importance except
+to a specialist. But that other lady who did
+know English literature like a specialist spoke
+of Mrs. Jameson’s defective hold on it very
+much as though it were an absent sunburst or
+an unbecoming gown. As for Maria, I should
+hate to spoil a woman to make a scholar. But
+on the other hand, I should hate to stunt a
+woman to make a pretty lady.”</p>
+
+<p>The Major said that in Maria’s case he would
+rather take the first chance than the second.
+“But if you will encourage Maria to come
+around here to dinner, Van Pelt,” he said, “I’ll
+get Jesup to catch that young Tomlinson person,
+and we will examine his mind. Perhaps
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</span>Maria may be interested to look into it, and if
+she is, I should love to see her try. I don’t
+know why, but when I hear of girls who are
+disposed to use their heads to think with, and
+who think it would be nice to know what’s
+doing, I always have irresistible impulses to
+abet them. They may sometime—yes, any
+time—think out and disclose such interesting
+things. For, after all, women are women, and
+we men all grope and want to know when we
+speculate about them.”</p>
+
+<p>He got up, went to a table drawer, and got
+out a little paper, which he gave me, saying
+“Here’s a tract for you, Peregrine,” and then
+we went back to the ladies.</p>
+
+<p>When Cordelia and I got home that night,
+and had viewed, approved, and tucked in our
+slumbering son, Samuel, and had discussed the
+company and their discourse, I brought out
+the Major’s tract and read it to her, to wit:</p>
+
+<p>“What are regarded as the great prizes of
+life—fame, money, and such showy things—are
+nearly all things geared to the powers of men.
+It is easy to measure the successes of men.
+They stand out in plain sight to be weighed
+and examined.</p>
+
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</span></p>
+<p>“But the successes of most of the successful
+women are much less tangible. As a rule they
+are contributions to life as it passes—influence,
+care, nurture, direction, companionship; valuables
+of the highest order, but which finally
+appear, not as properties of the woman from
+whom they proceeded, but of the men or the
+children who received them, and the families
+and communities that they have blessed.</p>
+
+<p>“The evidences of the success of men stand
+on pedestals and hang on walls and are recorded
+in books and occupy safe-deposit boxes in bank
+vaults. They stretch across the country in
+the form of steel rails or copper wires, or stand
+as buildings in stone and steel. On every one
+of them is the woman’s hand. In every one
+of them she has had her share. There is no
+success of any kind, no power, no progress,
+which is not half hers. But ordinarily she does
+not much appear; not, at least, in a degree at
+all commensurate with her importance. Her
+work is not expressed—not much—in things.
+It is made flesh.</p>
+
+<p>“Is that unjust to her? Is it unfair that
+man should seem to outdo her?</p>
+
+<p>“Who shall say what is fair and what not
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</span>in the management of this universe? We
+flatter ourselves with the idea that the Almighty
+has chosen to express Himself in mankind.
+Admitting that, it is a daring critic who will
+assert that woman is disparaged because it is
+allotted to her to express herself in like fashion.”</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+
+<p><span class="pagenum" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</span></p>
+
+
+  <h2 class="nobreak" id="VIII">
+    VIII
+    <br>
+    MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE
+  </h2>
+</div>
+
+
+<p class="dropcap"><span class="upper-case">How</span> am I to get a garden for Cordelia? I
+love so to see her in a garden. They’re
+fine for women. I like them myself, but the
+calls of the industry I pursue below Canal
+Street distract me from floriculture and personal
+pokings in the earth. I don’t even <i>plan</i>
+garden in any detail, which is partly, of course,
+because we have no actual garden possibilities
+yet to plan, though we still aspire to remote
+rhododendrons. But I get perceptible refreshment
+out of flower-beds, and very innocent and
+healing joys in the colors and texture and designs
+of flowers and the various patterns of
+millinery they affect. They are the great
+natural argument for art and beauty; immensely
+consoling and inspiring both for what they
+are and for what they intimate. Admiring
+them, even the imperfectly Scriptural, like me,
+revert instinctively to Scripture and to consideration
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</span>of the lilies, that toil not, neither
+spin, and yet are in the front of the competition
+for looks, and fit for their beauty’s sake to reproach
+the doubts of them of little faith. Certainly
+the Creator did not get up flowers for
+nothing.</p>
+
+<p>We must have a garden, if only for its pious
+uses, but for Cordelia it has admirable physical
+and mental uses besides. It gives her all the
+exercises—of mind, body, and spirit. Detached
+as she is from the soil she sprang from, in her
+mother’s garden she gets personally back to
+earth, grubbing in it with trowels and like implements,
+with beads on her brow and blisters
+and mosquito bites wherever they happen to
+come, but with a zest and an enjoyment that
+comes near to passion. Our parents, happily,
+have pretty good gardens, and all the spring we
+have been improving the week-ends by getting
+near to nature on the paternal suburban reservations.
+This being Samuel’s first spring, he
+has viewed it mostly from a perambulator, but,
+so seen, it has been profitable to him, and he
+has regarded its advances with perceptible approval,
+especially when it has been warm
+enough, and dry enough, for him to sleep informally
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</span>out-of-doors. No doubt the modern
+theory is sound that it is never too cold or too
+wet to sleep out-of-doors, but Samuel, being
+naturally robust, has never had to be absolutely
+modern in his observances. I leave it to any
+fair person if it is tolerable to think of his growing
+up without close and long association with
+the green-and-brown earth? Yet children do
+it by the hundred thousand in New York, and
+a fair proportion of them grow up stronger and
+better than a considerable proportion of the
+country-bred children. There are children, I
+am told, whom the city agrees with, and others—a
+minority—who suffer from the nervous tension
+of it. It is agreed, I suppose, that all
+children are better off out of town in summer,
+but so are grown people, provided they go to a
+healthier place and can find fit employments,
+or make them for themselves. But the hardy
+children, like the hardy grown-ups, seem to get
+along in town or out. I find that in June the
+country air begins to taste different from the
+town air, and when I get off the cars in the
+rural districts I fill my lungs with great gulps
+of it, to the easement of my feelings.</p>
+
+<p>Bless me, how much we want, and how much
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</span>it seems to cost to get it! Everybody wants a
+lot nowadays, and everybody, except the seriously
+opulent, seems to find the cost excessive.
+I suppose everybody wants for his child what
+Cordelia and I want for Samuel. Everybody
+seems to want to live some sort of a life that’s
+worth living, and to get the price of it somehow.
+It is a large contract for society to meet
+these natural and reasonable desires; no wonder
+the world’s machinery groans so, and that
+strikes and perplexities and trust trials so much
+abound, and that so much talk is in the air
+about the right of the people to rule. But ruling
+is a skilled job, and though it is none too
+well done, and never has been, the notion that
+“the people” are first-class experts at it who
+are kept out of power by interlopers seems to
+me more or less humorous. And so is the notion
+that we “people” have any great eagerness to
+rule. We haven’t. That’s one trouble. Almost
+all of us want to go about our business and
+procure some of the ameliorations of existence.
+Ruling is hard work and small pay. We want
+some one else to do it, if possible; some one
+who has a call and feels that he has a talent
+for government. These gentlemen who talk
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</span>about the people ruling are usually gentlemen
+who have inward admonitions that they possess
+governmental talent. We choose between them,
+and to that extent we rule, and have been ruling
+for some time, and will rule, I guess, for some
+time to come.</p>
+
+<p>Cordelia and I would like to vote for more
+room in our flat. It’s too tight. Now, with
+Samuel and his belongings to provide for, we
+haven’t room to hang up and put away our
+things. We want a larger apartment, cheaper
+food, especially milk, reduction in the price of
+clothes, lower servants’ wages—more, generally,
+for our money. But I don’t know just
+how to vote for these things without running
+up against the reasonable needs of other people.
+All the measures I would favor as suitable to
+make my earnings go further seem constituted
+to make somebody else’s earnings less. That
+wouldn’t hinder me from voting to reduce the
+tariff, because I think it ought to be reduced,
+but I don’t want to vote any less wages for
+Matilda Finn. Demand and taxation fix rents;
+how am I going to vote them cheaper? If the
+Meat Trust makes meat unduly dear, I’m against
+it; but I am not at all sure that it does. If the
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</span>excessive multiplication of grocers makes potatoes
+high, it is a pity, but how am I going to
+vote against it? I can vote, when the chance
+comes, for the best city government that is
+offered, and the best obtainable bargain about
+public utilities, and supervision of milk, and
+such things; and I can vote for tariff reform,
+and trust regulation, and conservation in so
+far as those desirables are affected by retaining
+or dismissing the present administrators of the
+Federal government; but after I have voted
+all I can—and expressed my primary preference,
+and initiated and recalled and referended,
+if those privileges are offered me—it will still
+remain undoubtedly that if I want more closet-room
+for Cordelia and a continuing residence
+in town and a garden somewhere, I’ve got to
+get in more money. So I’m in just the same
+case as the mill-hands and the miners and
+everybody else who has been on a strike lately,
+except that I haven’t got to strike unless I
+want to, and I sha’n’t want to until I have
+an offer of something better than I’ve got now.</p>
+
+<p>It makes me ashamed to keep wanting more
+money, even though the mill-hands and miners
+and the rest feel just as I do about it. But,
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</span>after all, that want is the great spur of civilization.
+If most of us didn’t want more closet-room,
+and a garden, and a roof-garden sleeping-apartment
+for Samuel, and a little larger
+dinner-parties than we can give as it is and
+more of them, and food, clothes, education,
+leisure, travel, automobiles, and all the other
+necessaries and unnecessaries, I suppose all
+progress would slacken. The whole apparatus
+of civilization seems to be geared to these more
+or less humble human desires. Politics is a
+sort of rash that breaks out on bodies of men
+that are tired with too much work, or hungry,
+or starved in their spirits, or thwarted in their
+aspirations, or who need more closet-room and
+gardens. The politicians are not rulers, after
+all; they are doctors, making diagnoses, and
+offering prescriptions and treatments, and taking
+fees, and flunked a good deal of the time
+by the symptoms of the patient. A real cure
+of human ailments by politics is inconceivable.
+There are too many people, and they want more
+than there is, and if they were all satisfied for
+once at a quarter past six, there would be a lot
+more of them, and they would have developed
+a lot more wants, by seven o’clock. But that
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</span>only proves that politics is a continuing job,
+that never will lapse, and never will be finished
+so long as there are folks on the earth.</p>
+
+<p>It is wonderful what is accomplished; how
+we endure labor, privations, disappointment,
+restricted closet-space, and lack of gardens, and
+go on comparatively orderly and patient, getting
+what we can and going without the rest.
+Shops are full of goods and the doors open;
+trains run, crowds surge here and there, strikers
+strike and pickets picket, judges sit, juries find,
+the polls open and close, and the papers tell us
+who was elected. Somehow, in all this muddle,
+life is fairly safe, most of the people are fed,
+babies get attention, the dead are buried, the
+processes of existence go on.</p>
+
+<p>The whole of politics seems secondary because
+the whole material side of life, even gardens
+and closet-room, seems secondary. I guess
+that is what saves the world alive. There are
+not enough material things to satisfy everybody.
+I doubt indeed if there are enough to satisfy
+anybody. But of the things of the mind and
+of the things of the spirit there is a boundless
+supply, and any one who can may help himself.</p>
+
+<p>We scramble for things as though they were
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</span>all there was, and yet the main joys of life are
+in ideas—in religion, in love, in beauty, in duty,
+in truth—things that no trust can monopolize,
+and which come tariff-free through any port.
+They are the realities, and these bodily things
+are mostly shadows, indispensable, to be sure—things
+that it is a reproach and a high inconvenience
+to be without, but which take care
+of themselves so long as the realities prosper.</p>
+
+<p class="p2">Well, I have got a boost. Major Brace has
+suggested to me that I move my tools over to
+his office this fall and become a partner in his
+firm. The suggestion is agreeable to me, and
+I have closed with it. His firm is undergoing
+reorganization. At present it is Brace &amp; Ketcham,
+but Mr. Ketcham’s wife has fallen into
+so much money that, having also some savings
+of his own, he feels the need of foreign travel,
+country air, and like delights, and proposes to
+retire from active practice and concern himself
+with self-improvement, cows, and public or
+quasi-public duties, like being a director in
+banks and corporations, serving on committees,
+or even running for public office. There seems
+to be a great deal for competent and experienced
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</span>citizens to do whenever they have acquired the
+means of support and can afford to take nominal
+pay, or none, for their services. The new firm
+is to be Brace, Witherspoon &amp; Jesup; which last
+is me. It will be a strong firm. The Major has
+experience and connections; Mr. Witherspoon
+has knowledge, especially of law, and appalling
+diligence; and I have a living to make for Cordelia
+and Samuel and myself, and everything
+to buy, including a city mansion, a country
+residence, some automobiles, and a garden with
+rhododendrons in it. When I think how modest
+my proportion of the firm’s winnings is to be,
+and how much it is to buy, my arithmetical
+talents are strained to compute the princely
+affluence that must be coming out of the new
+firm to the Major.</p>
+
+<p>Anyhow, my circumstances will be eased
+enough for us to move into a more commodious
+flat next fall, which is important. The modification
+in my prospects pleases me very much.
+I am attached to the Major. He is good to
+be with. I feel confident that he will make a
+living, and either make it honestly or make it
+look so honest to me that my self-esteem will
+not be wounded by a lot of compunctions. I
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</span>think so because I believe he is at least as
+scrupulous as I am, and has more experience
+in adjusting his scruples to the facts of life.
+And that is a mighty delicate matter. If you
+can’t do it you get nowhere, and if you overdo
+it you get eventually, I presume, to that ideality
+that we call “hell.” I don’t know that I should
+necessarily mind that, for it is possible that
+the attractions of hell may have been under-rated;
+but I hate consumedly the processes of
+getting there as I see them. The by-path by
+drink is so far out of my line that I don’t have
+to take serious thought about it; nor yet about
+the propensity to divagations in feminine companionship,
+which makes some persons so much
+trouble; but I believe I may say without affectation
+that I would hate the detachment from
+that ideality which we call “truth.” Surely
+the greatest possible luxury in life is to think
+you are on the right side; to know the truth and
+follow it, or at least, since we are all so fallible,
+to think you know it and are on its trail. To
+think that I was going to practise law merely
+as the agent of the astute, filching unwarranted
+profits from the simple, would be quite intolerable,
+of course. It would be so at least as long
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</span>as I continued to be any good, for I should
+think of it as a progress to “hell”; and when it
+ceased to bother me, that would be the sign
+that I had arrived. That’s the kind of hell the
+idea of which is repellent—the hell in which
+the damned are fat and hard and solvent, and
+relentlessly and eternally gainful for themselves.
+Ugh! They make me sick; at least the thought
+of them does. When you come to look for
+them in the flesh, of course they have their
+human modifications and are often lean, jocund,
+and charming.</p>
+
+<p>The Major says there’s a new morality growing
+up that will express itself presently in some
+new commandments, or a new interpretation
+of the sixth. Stealing, as heretofore understood,
+has been limited, he says, to taking from
+some one something that was his. But there
+is a growing sentiment that it applies also to
+hogging an unconscionable amount of things
+desirable for the mass of folks, but to which
+none of them had established legal ownership.
+As “the people” grow stronger and more intelligent
+there is more interest in having them
+get what should be coming to them. So the
+Major looks for the evolution of a commandment
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</span>to the general effect of “Thou shalt not
+take more than thy share,” and for lots of legislation
+based on it. And since what anybody’s
+share is depends on all manner of circumstances,
+and is highly debatable, and is sure to get into
+court again and again, he looks for busy—and
+profitable—times for our profession.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the bulk of the law business is
+not a wrangle between the wolf and the lamb,
+with all the best talent retained for the wolf.
+A good deal of it is wrangles between wolves,
+wherein it is just as virtuous to be on one side
+as the other; and a lot more of it is not wrangle
+at all, but a tame exercise of the lawyer’s true
+profession of keeping order in the world.</p>
+
+<p>All the same, it must be embarrassing to any
+lawyer’s ethical self-esteem always to be the
+defender, at a high price, of the strong. It
+can’t be easy to avoid it, once a man gets a
+considerable reputation; but I guess it does
+pinch. Politically, of course, it is very expensive,
+and that, without much regard for
+the truth that when Strength is right, even
+though it is incorporated, it is just as important
+to society that it should get its dues under the
+law as though it were somebody else. The risks
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</span>of an employment are one of the considerations
+on which its rate of payment is based, and in
+this legal employment to which I seem committed,
+the risk of discredit may well be one
+basis for extra large fees. Disreputability is
+bound to rub off of clients on their lawyers,
+provided there is enough of it, and the association
+is long enough continued, and highly enough
+paid, or insufficiently varied by professional
+associations of another sort.</p>
+
+<p>I should not like to be committed bodily to
+the side of the Haves in my legal experiences,
+and I know I never shall be so long as I am in
+the same firm with the Major. Neither do I
+want to tie up to impossible enthusiasms and
+altruisms; and to plans that won’t work, and
+to fabulous expectations of making the earth
+equally comfortable for all its residents irrespective
+of their powers and qualities. The
+Major does not go in for those phantoms. He
+will not always be right, but he will never be
+systematically impossible.</p>
+
+<p>I guess Witherspoon is going to get rich. He
+is terribly smart; so smart, and so nearly sound-minded,
+and so nearly drink-proof, that, with
+the start he has, it will be virtually impossible
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</span>for him to stay poor. If not myself, I would
+rather be Witherspoon than any one I see about.
+I could not afford to be the Major; he is too old.
+I have too much to do, and too much expectation
+of liking to do it, to wish to be he, much
+as I like him. Witherspoon is older than I am,
+older by nine or ten years, I guess, but I could
+almost afford that advancement in years for
+what I might gain in ability by having his head
+instead of mine. Not, of course, that I would
+be he, unless it was compulsory that I should
+be some one other than I am. A property that
+one has taken so much pains to improve as me
+becomes dear to the owner. I rate among
+improvements Cordelia and Samuel (though
+you may call them liabilities if you like), all
+that I know, my acquaintance, my reputation,
+the repairs done on my teeth (which were quite
+expensive), advertisement as so far acquired
+(except as already mentioned under acquaintance
+and reputation), a little life insurance paid
+up to date, and there must be a lot of other
+improvements I can’t think of. To offset all
+that, I have expensive habits (like Cordelia and
+Samuel) and the probability of others. I smoke
+and drink, though inexpensively as yet, and like
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</span>better food and rather better clothes than I am
+entitled to.</p>
+
+<p>One thing that I admire about Witherspoon
+is his clothes; they are so bad—or rather he
+is so oblivious to them. I guess they are pretty
+good clothes, but he is apt to wear them like
+a man in the woods; I see him sometimes going
+about in this polite community in rough-looking,
+unshiny, russet shoes, a flannel shirt with a
+soft collar, his trousers turned up, not precisely
+but casually; and if he has on black shoes, like
+as not they are not polished. That is liable to
+be his working dress. He does better at times;
+does better doubtless if he happens to think
+of it or his wife tells him, and he togs himself
+out properly when he goes out to dinner; but
+his mind is not on raiment, nor much on details
+of living, anyhow. Presently, I suppose,
+his wife will say he must have a valet, and his
+clothes will be pressed and laid out for him for
+the rest of time, and he will put them on and
+always go forth shining. But he’s fine as he is.</p>
+
+<p>It is grand to be enough of a man to be worth
+a servant to do all one’s chores. It is also
+grand meanwhile to be able to dress as inattentively
+as Witherspoon does. If he were lazy
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</span>he couldn’t do it, nor yet if he had not on him
+so many of the marks of a first-class man. If
+he were just ordinary, you’d be displeased with
+him for not being clean-shaven, but when he
+smiles and begins to talk you don’t care whether
+he shaved yesterday or the day before, nor
+whether his shoes are blacked, nor what kind
+of a collar he has on.</p>
+
+<p>I’m not that way at all. I have to wear
+respectable clothes, brush my hair and teeth,
+shave every morning, black my shoes, and pay
+attention to millinery. I succeed in all these
+details, and would make, I suppose, an acceptable
+body-servant for a really great man, or a
+fairly good housemaid, if it were not that I am
+able, under Providence, to put the remnant of my
+time after attending to my own details to more
+profitable use than doing ordinary details for
+some one else. Details I shall do, no doubt, for
+some time to come if not forever, but they will
+be fairly remunerative details, I hope, requiring
+judgment and knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>It’s all service, and all that matters much to
+the moralist is that each of us should come,
+somehow, where he belongs, and get the sort
+of job he can learn to be good at, and delve at
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</span>it until a better one calls him—if it does. But
+of course to find one’s proper job is a great
+achievement in life, being the one that engages
+my energies at present. Also to find a man
+proper for a job that needs doing seems to be
+a considerable achievement, bigger or less big,
+according to the size of the job, but supremely
+important when the job is a vital matter like
+the Presidency sometimes, or the discovery of
+an effectual general in war, or a revolutionary
+leader. The processes by which the top men
+come to the top are as interesting as anything
+in history. Indeed, they almost constitute
+history. Usually they are processes of trying
+out, and it seems that the qualifications for a
+great place must include, as a rule, the ability
+to get the place, and, if it is political, to get it
+away from somebody else. But the unpolitical
+places don’t seem so much to be wrested from
+anybody. The most powerful men just come
+to their own. Commonly they make the places
+which they occupy, and the places grow with
+them, until, when they get out, there is a gaping
+vacancy to be filled.</p>
+
+<p>That is not the sort of place for which the
+Major has selected me. Not yet. It’s just a
+<span class="pagenum" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</span>chance to do some work as it comes along, and
+make a place, possibly, which can be recognized
+as definite, commodious, and profitable because
+of some scarcity of the qualities required to fill
+it. I have great confidence in the Major, and
+feel strongly that his judgment in choosing
+persons and foreseeing labors for them is excellent,
+and I have faith in particular, as I have
+intimated, in his sagacity in selecting Witherspoon.
+So I am a good deal pleased that he
+should have invited me.</p>
+
+
+<p class="p4 center">THE END</p>
+
+
+<hr class="chap x-ebookmaker-drop">
+<div class="chapter">
+<div class="transnote">
+  <p class="ph2">
+    TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
+  </p>
+
+
+<p>Typo corrected: “perfomance” to “performance” (<a href="#Page_128">page 128</a>).</p>
+
+<p>Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been left unchanged.</p>
+</div>
+</div>
+<div style='text-align:center'>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78473 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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