Reflections of a beginning husband

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

“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 [Pg 2]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 [Pg 3]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 [Pg 4]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 [Pg 5]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 [Pg 6]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 [Pg 7]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 [Pg 8]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 [Pg 9]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 [Pg 10]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;” 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 [Pg 12]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.

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?”

“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.”

“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. [Pg 14]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.”

“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?”

“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, [Pg 15]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—”

“Oh no! By no means. No! No! I never was the least keen to have you. But why didn’t you?”

“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.”

“He said: ‘Good God! Cordelia. Not that one! Wait, and perhaps you may catch a man! [Pg 16]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.”

“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 [Pg 17]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!”

“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 [Pg 18]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 [Pg 19]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.”

“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 [Pg 20]people; from pleasures and from people that waste time and money and give nothing back that is worth having.”

“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.”

“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 [Pg 21]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.”

“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. [Pg 23]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 [Pg 24]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 [Pg 25]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 [Pg 26]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.

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 [Pg 28]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 [Pg 29]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 [Pg 30]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 [Pg 31]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 [Pg 32]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 [Pg 33]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 [Pg 34]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 [Pg 35]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 [Pg 36]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 [Pg 37]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 [Pg 38]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 [Pg 39]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 [Pg 42]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 [Pg 43]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 [Pg 44]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 [Pg 45]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 [Pg 46]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 [Pg 47]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 [Pg 48]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 [Pg 49]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 [Pg 50]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 [Pg 51]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!

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 [Pg 53]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 [Pg 54]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, [Pg 55]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.

“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 [Pg 56]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 [Pg 57]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 [Pg 58]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 [Pg 59]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 [Pg 60]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 [Pg 61]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. [Pg 62]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 [Pg 63]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 [Pg 64]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 [Pg 65]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 [Pg 66]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 [Pg 67]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 [Pg 68]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 [Pg 69]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 [Pg 70]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 [Pg 71]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 [Pg 72]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.

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. [Pg 74]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 [Pg 75]Street by tunnel or trolley, and you catch the car on the next corner.

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 [Pg 76]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 [Pg 77]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. [Pg 78]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 [Pg 79]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 [Pg 80]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 [Pg 81]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 [Pg 82]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 [Pg 84]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 [Pg 85]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 [Pg 86]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 [Pg 87]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 [Pg 88]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 [Pg 89]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 [Pg 92]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, [Pg 93]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.

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 [Pg 95]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 [Pg 96]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 [Pg 97]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, [Pg 98]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 [Pg 99]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 [Pg 100]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 [Pg 101]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 [Pg 102]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 [Pg 103]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 [Pg 104]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 [Pg 105]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 [Pg 106]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 [Pg 107]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 [Pg 108]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 [Pg 109]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 [Pg 111]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 [Pg 112]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 [Pg 113]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 [Pg 114]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 [Pg 115]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.

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 [Pg 117]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 [Pg 118]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. [Pg 119]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. [Pg 120]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 [Pg 121]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 [Pg 122]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 [Pg 123]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 [Pg 124]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 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 [Pg 126]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 [Pg 127]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 [Pg 128]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 [Pg 129]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 [Pg 130]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 [Pg 131]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 [Pg 132]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.”

“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 [Pg 133]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. [Pg 134]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. [Pg 135]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 [Pg 136]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 [Pg 137]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 [Pg 138]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 [Pg 139]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. [Pg 140]“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 [Pg 141]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 [Pg 142]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 [Pg 143]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.

“Who shall say what is fair and what not [Pg 145]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.”

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 [Pg 147]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 [Pg 148]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 [Pg 149]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 [Pg 150]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 [Pg 151]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, [Pg 152]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 [Pg 153]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 [Pg 154]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 [Pg 155]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 [Pg 156]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 [Pg 157]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 [Pg 158]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 [Pg 159]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 [Pg 160]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 [Pg 161]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 [Pg 162]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 [Pg 163]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 [Pg 164]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.

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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Reflections of a beginning husband

REFLECTIONS OF
A BEGINNING HUSBAND

CONTENTS

I
BY THE SECOND INTENTION

II
SOME DETAILS OF LIVING

III
COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT

IV
THE BABY

V
A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE

VI
POLITICS

VII
WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION

VIII
MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE

THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Reflections of a beginning husband

REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING HUSBAND

CONTENTS

I BY THE SECOND INTENTION

II SOME DETAILS OF LIVING

III COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT

IV THE BABY

V A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE

VI POLITICS

VII WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION

VIII MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE