Chapter I: Part 1

REFLECTIONS OF
A BEGINNING HUSBAND

BY
EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN

AUTHOR OF
“THE LUXURY OF CHILDREN”
“LUCID INTERVALS,” ETC.

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXIII

COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PUBLISHED APRIL, 1913

CONTENTS

CHAP. PAGE

I. BY THE SECOND INTENTION 1

II. SOME DETAILS OF LIVING 27

III. COMMODITIES AND CONTENTMENT 52

IV. THE BABY 73

V. A CONTRIBUTION FROM MAJOR BRACE 94

VI. POLITICS 116

VII. WE DINE OUT AND DISCUSS EDUCATION 125

VIII. MY PROSPECTS IMPROVE 146

REFLECTIONS OF A BEGINNING
HUSBAND

REFLECTIONS OF
A BEGINNING HUSBAND

I

BY THE SECOND INTENTION

“Dear Mr. French,” my letter began, “Cordelia and I have a mind again to get married. But having once been engaged and quit, we have no mind at all to be engaged again and divulge it. Would you mind, please, you and Mrs. French, if we eloped? It seems so much the more feasible and private way.”

I would rather have broken it to him by word of mouth, but for some things it is written words or none. If you have determined to elope with a man’s daughter you can’t very well go and ask leave of him. Suppose he objects! Of course he will object, especially after consulting his wife. The only way, if you propose to consult him at all, is to write, and mail the letter on the way to the church and come back to the house afterward for the answer.

Cordelia felt she just couldn’t be publicly engaged to me again. Of course I didn’t mind. I think meanly of the engaged state _per se_, but I had always rather be engaged to Cordelia than not. But that was only because I had always wanted to marry her, and had been glad to throw any convenient obstacle, even an engagement, in the way of her marrying any one else. The thing that had bothered me was to have the engagement end without our being married. I wanted to have it die a natural death in church, with flowers and a minister, and it had irked me very sore indeed to be “released” like a baseball-player before the end of the season. It left me on a miserably awkward footing with the rest of the world and with her, and it left her in the same case. Nobody quite knew whether to congratulate either of us on getting rid of the other. People naturally wanted to know why, and of course you can’t tell in the newspaper. It was awkward for our families. There was a feeling that they ought to quarrel, because somebody must be to blame, and the other side ought to resent it. But they didn’t want to quarrel, and wouldn’t; not even a little, to keep up appearances. They held their tongues and went on about their business as before, but inevitably flocked more apart than they had been wont to do, because when they met it excited too much interest.

I don’t mean that they were such conspicuous people that the London papers had cables about them. It was only that when Mrs. Fessenden or Mrs. Somebody Else got home from the Jenkinses’ tea she told her family, and whomever she had to dinner, that Mrs. French and Harriet and Mrs. Jesup were at the Jenkinses’ and spoke, as they passed, as politely as though nothing had happened. And then would follow a little chattering tribute of discourse about Cordelia French and Peregrine Jesup, and why did they break their engagement, anyway!

Not that my family, or Cordelia’s, got direct reports of what was said at Mrs. Fessenden’s dinner-table. They didn’t; at least, not often. But they knew what must have been said, and families don’t like to be subjects of speculation or of critical or even compassionate observation. They can bear the eye of approval, of admiration, and even of a moderate envy, but what family likes to have the Fessendens, the Jenkinses, the Underharrows, the Overtons, and the rest of the families getting their heads together to swap surmises as to what the Frenches and the Jesups have got in their closet!

Maybe you’d like to know why Cordelia and I loosed hands after our intentions had been six months on file. In this private way why should I not explain that it was not so much the fault of either of us as of the conditions of life as we found them. You see, I was twenty-three, and Cordelia was two years younger. I was studying the profession in which I hope to be useful in my day and generation, and by the practice of which I hope to derive a respectable maintenance from a contributory world, which Cordelia was already inspecting. That’s what she was doing. She was out of school and looking about, shifting from continent to continent to get a better view; getting acquainted with people and things, ascertaining whom and what she liked and what places seemed more joyous to her than others. What for so much inspection and investigation to prepare her for a destiny already measured off, tied up, and waiting to be called for? If she had been in college, she might possibly have kept. I don’t know what are the merits of the women’s colleges as depositories for engaged girls, but they may have a value for that use. But a roving life of enlargement by travel and social experience has no such value at all. There was I, tied up to professional studies, on such allowances as my indulgent parents could afford me without too gross injustice to their own family life and their obligations to their other dependents. And there was Cordelia, diligently qualifying herself to live creditably and profitably on an income of from twelve thousand a year up.

You might suppose that ordinary precautions would have been taken to prevent her from seeing much of a person so unsuited to her needs as I, but they were not. There was nothing against me: I had no criminal record, did not drink much, was of respectable origin, had known Cordelia a long time already, and was such a person, in a general way, as she might properly enough marry sometime, if circumstances suited. Cordelia came out, and went to dances and dinners. She had to dance with somebody. Male persons of the dancing age and disposition with incomes of from twelve thousand up are rather scarce. Dances cannot be equipped with such alone: neither can dinners. So Cordelia danced with anybody who asked her soon enough, and that was often me; and she ate her dinner alongside of whoever was put next to her, and that was sometimes me. And when it wasn’t me I wished it was; and so what happened, happened all in natural course and according to reasonable expectation, and nobody ventured to disprove, though doubtless there was a fair volume of conjecture as to whose money Cordelia French and Peregrine Jesup proposed to get married on. But we had not selected anybody to underwrite our prospective happiness. We had not got so far as that. We had just got irresponsibly engaged, according to the American plan and the spontaneous promptings of youth and affection.

What about our current American practice of turning most of the girls loose from school at eighteen or nineteen and keeping most of the youths, who are their natural mates, tied up to professional studies or business apprenticeships four or five years longer, and letting them play together meanwhile, and expecting them to shape their own destinies on practical and satisfactory lines? Isn’t a good deal expected of us young people, all tinder, sparks, and indiscretion? The French, they tell me, expect less and provide more. I have thought a good deal of these concerns since Cordelia and I were first engaged and found our intentions unseasonable. Of course, I wanted to be considered in Cordelia’s plans and deportment; wanted, naturally, to have her stay around where I could see her at recess and on Sundays and other holidays, and perhaps meet her at festive gatherings when the urgency of my studies permitted me to get to them. I liked to have her around handy, but of course I could not interdict her from going about, or even from going beyond the seas when it suited her parents to take her. I could say that she had already seen as much of the world and the people in it as was necessary, but how was I to insist that, while I was cultivating and improving my abilities all I knew how, Cordelia should let most of hers lie fallow and mark time and wait? If she had only had a steady job to work at in the intermission while I was qualifying myself to work at mine, things might have worked out serenely; but the only job she had was to get married, and meanwhile to cheer and satisfy her parents, and try to be worth her keep to them while she was making acquaintance with the world. Marriage seems to be a complete occupation (circumstances being favorable), but being engaged isn’t. It’s just a makeshift, delightful for six weeks, very suitable for three months, and tolerable for six; but when it contemplates indefinite extension into uncertain years it is an asset of very doubtful value to a girl in active social life. When the Frenches found that Cordelia seemed to be losing interest in affairs, was indifferent to dances and dinners, was apt to be abandoned by mankind to the society of chaperones, was getting left out of house-parties that I could not go to, was gently indisposed to put the sea or any wide expanse of land between herself and me, and was rather aggravated than appeased by the little she could see of me when I was near, they said--the parents did: “This isn’t working to much of a charm! Nobody is ahead on it, and we are getting behind. Cordelia’s no fun any more, and there is no end of it in sight.”

And soon after Cordelia and I called our engagement off, much to our grief and with the sympathy of our elders. I advised her to put me down to the account of experience, and try to figure out a profit on me, if she could. But I never put her down to account of anything, being of just the same mind about her that I always had been, though grievously put out to leave her blooming on the paternal bush without any “hands-off” sign on her, protected only by her natural thorns.

There was a line in the paper to say the engagement was off, Cordelia went abroad again, I continued my studies, and time went on. It does go on somehow; the trick is to keep on going with it. Who does that, gets somewhere in spite of impediments, lacerations of the affections, and all misgivings about the possibility of there being a gap anywhere in the procession of self-supporters that a new aspirant can fit himself into. I have been called “sensible.” It seems a painfully tame thing to be, and I presume I was called so by way of disparagement. But, after all, there are times when there is no choice but between being sensible and being silly, and then you have just got to be sensible if you can, no matter how it tastes. Being sensible, while one is working to get a start in life, must be excused, because it is the price of adventure, indiscretion, speculation--all the really glorious and spectacular parts of human existence.

Three years I was sensible and plugged away at my job, learning the rudiments and then the application of them. All that time I had never a word with Cordelia. How could I? I could not go on where I left off, and unless, or until, I could do that, how could I go on at all? Sight of her I did have now and then, but seldom; for, though she was often in town and I nearly always there, our occupations usually kept us from accidental meetings. We didn’t travel the same beats.

I finished my professional studies, sustained the tests provided to measure my proficiency, and got a job in an office with a small salary and some prospects. Candor requires that I admit that I passed those examinations pretty well, for really I had not spared work in the long preparation for them.

And the job I got was a good one as beginners’ jobs go, and the prospects were as good, so far as I could see, as the prospects of anybody of my time of life and in my line of endeavor. So I didn’t see why, barring accidents, I should not get somewhere presently.

So the months sped. Coming early up-town on a late October day, I got into a pay-as-you-enter car at Forty-second Street, and there was Cordelia, alone and with a seat vacant beside her, which I took.

“This is a fine day,” said I, “and you become it very much, and I hope you have good health?”

“Oh yes,” said Cordelia.

“And good spirits?” said I.

“Oh yes;” but she said it more doubtfully and with no more than a languid affirmation.

“And I hope that sport is good,” said I; and she assented to that, but in a way that suggested that it might be more boisterously satisfactory. And with that we fell into discourse, trifling but easy, and that progressed in its tone from easy to friendly, and from friendly to old-friendly. And I let the car pass Fifty-fourth Street and pretended to myself I was going to Fifty-ninth, and let it pass Fifty-ninth and pretended nothing further to myself. It wasn’t until some days later that I learned that her intended destination was Fifty-seventh Street. As it was, while rolling through the Sixties we each cautiously discovered that we were bound for the Museum at Eighty-second Street, and there we got off; and since it was, as I pointed out to her, too lovely an autumn day to go indoors, we went and sat down in the Park instead, and there, a little off the track of passers-by, fell into discussion of the conditions of contemporary existence.

“Cordelia,” said I, “are you having any fun?”

She meditated a moment. Three years is a long time in the early twenties, and Cordelia had grown perceptibly thoughtfuler since she and I left off.

“Fun? Oh yes, I have _some_. It has been a pleasant summer. We went abroad in the spring, and it was nice in the country after we got home. People were sometimes interesting; some of the books were good to read; I liked the flowers in the garden, and I liked to ride a horse, and sometimes motoring was pleasant, and the swimming and the sailing.”

I confess that my heart settled back a bit at this list of profitable occupations. “Are you marrying any one this fall, Cordelia?” said I. “Have you an interesting line of suitors now? Or can it be that being well off you have the unusual discretion to realize it?”

“Oh, I realize it; yes, a good deal. But I am only temporarily well off.”

“What’s the matter? Father’s stocks look shaky to you?”

“Oh no. Father doesn’t seem anxious.”

“Suitors, maybe. Perhaps you feel yourself near capitulation?”

“Possibly! But I have not diagnosed it so.”

“Down there where you spend your summers there are stock-brokers growing on every bush, and the stock-brokers, you know, Cordelia, are the only _young_ men--except the hereditary rich--who have money enough to get married on.”

“Why didn’t you turn to that yourself, Peregrine?”

“I? Bless you! I never had a chance. Nobody ever seemed to see the making of a stock-broker in me. And besides--well, I confess I have never felt drawn to that vocation. I would like uncommonly well to earn plenty of money, and I mean to, sometime; but I’d rather have the pay seem more like an incident of my job than have my job an incident of my pay.”

“I’m afraid you are not a really earnest money-maker, Peregrine?”

“Just wait till I get a chance to throw in my clutch; then you’ll see! And I’ll soon begin to get it now! But if you think well of the stock-broker calling, Cordelia, there was Archibald Tassel. I heard of him as having the discernment to be your warm admirer; and a wholesome, hearty young man too, and well found. And yet you seem never to have smiled on him?”

“So?”

“It must be you don’t care for a sporting life. Well, I am only moderately drawn to it myself. You have to work so hard and pay so high for what you get, and it’s so hard on the tissues, and you get so little in the end. But there was that cheerful young Van Terminal, Cordelia; pockets bulging with ancestral coin; nice manners, immense energy, large appetite for pleasure, four or five automobiles in his garage, and a private tank of gasolene with a pipe-line connection with Hunters Point. If there is an eligible young man about, it is Corlear Van Terminal, and yet, Cordelia--”

“Mercy, Peregrine, would you have me marry him?”

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

“Why should I?”

“Everything money can buy, and not such a bad encumbrance. Amiable young man enough, and you with your great qualifications for companionship and direction might have kept him out of serious mischief all his days. I don’t say you could have done it, but it was conceivably possible.”

“He’s very nice and so jocund. Mother and I were much pleased with him--are still. I don’t know what efforts I should have made if it hadn’t been for father.”

“What did _he_ say?”

“I hardly like to tell you!”

“Oh yes, do!”

“He said: ‘Good God! Cordelia. Not that one! Wait, and perhaps you may catch a _man_! Leave those joyous natures to marry chorus girls,’ he said, and told me I was built for something better than to be the ballast for a joy-rider’s motor-car. That’s just like father. He’s not very practical. But it flattered me, and I didn’t try after that.”

“Poor girl! What a father! What a tremendous handicap parents are, anyway!”

“You needn’t complain of father. That was the only time he meddled. He has done his best for me. He knows admirable young men! ‘Father’s friends,’ I call them. Somehow they never make up to me. But I’m improving; I know I am. I think so much my hair is coming out, and the day may come when I shall find grace in the eyes of one of ‘father’s friends.’”

“Oh no! Cordelia, don’t! I have a better plan for you. I know such a good young man, who has needed you with gnawing destitution, night and day going on four years.”

“How interesting! The poor young man! Destitute of me and I suppose of all the other goods of this world, and mortgaged besides for the support of his aged grandmother! I beg you, Peregrine, not to attempt to entangle me with impossible good young men. Life is too fleeting. The American spring is too short. All in a minute is it summer, and to-morrow comes Fourth of July and haytime, and we are cut down and cast into the oven.”

“Well, dear Cordelia, take a broker--take a broker! Or some nice old gentleman; or a widower or something, with ready-made shekels strung on him!”

“Don’t be unkind to me, Peregrine!”

“Oh, well--I was telling you--where was I? You put me all out when you speak like that. Oh yes--the good young destitute man! Well, the good young man has no grandmother to support--only himself as yet, and can do that, by George! And it’s time; he’s rising twenty-seven. And his prospects are not bad now. And if he could manage to get married they’d be better; they’d have to be. You see, we have to get one thing at a time, and I’ve known awful cases--even I in my short experience have observed them--of men who waited until they had got a good living before they got married, and found, when they got ready to get a wife, that their minds had been on other things so long that they had clean forgotten how. That’s awful, isn’t it? It happens all the time. I see it at the clubs. I don’t want it to happen to--to the good young semi-destitute man I had in mind.”

“Oh no, Peregrine; surely not. It’s an awful thought; awful! But yet, suppose he got the girl, what--”

“What costs so dreadfully much, Cordelia? I know of quite a decent flat for fifty dollars a month; a nice flat over a tailor shop, and not in Harlem either--not twenty blocks from where we’re sitting. And for three dollars a day you can get food enough for two or three persons--eggs not superlatively fresh, perhaps, but eggs--and for a dollar a day you can hire a very good servant, and that’s only a little more than forty dollars a week; and a good young man of twenty-seven, with four or five years of hard work behind him, who can’t see his way to lay his hands on at least sixty dollars a week isn’t good enough for you. But sixty would about do it, Cordelia. Sixty plunks is a great deal of money--a whole lot of money to earn--but not an unattainable wage; not one that a diligent and competent trained hand need consider the limit of his aspirations--no, not in a city like this with a traction company to be supported, and eighty million people in the back country to help pay five millions of us for living here.”

“You are a more calculating person than you used to be, Peregrine. When did you work all that out? And suppose it were possible to live on sixty dollars a week, what makes you think it would pay to do it, and why do most people of our habits think they need so very much more?”

“The trouble with them is they haven’t been emancipated. The things that cost are amusement and social aspirations. If you can cut those out for a time, living is not so impossibly dear. But stupid people can’t do it, and unemancipated people don’t dare to.”

“Unemancipated? Unemancipated! Unemancipated from what, Peregrine?”

“From _things_, Cordelia, and the habit of needing them in superfluous quantity; from the standards of living set by people who are poor on fifty thousand a year; from the idea of life that is based on what you have got; from automobiles, and expensive sports, and boxes at the opera; from the notion that it is essential to keep in the swim, and know only the right people; from pleasures and from people that waste time and money and give nothing back that is worth having.”

“My! Peregrine! When did you turn anarchist?”

“Not long after our engagement was broken. I loved you, Cordelia, that’s the truth, and I hated everything that broke it. I learned to see that there was no obstacle between you and me that a little time and hard work could not easily overcome, and that the obstacles that looked biggest and blackest had no real substance to them, and could be brushed aside whenever we were ready and had the grit to do it. Don’t cry, Cordelia! If you let me hold your hand again, I don’t think any one would notice.”

“I was--I wasn’t crying, Peregrine. I--I was--only thinking!”

“Don’t cry! Because this is such a delightful world for folks who are free and can work, and have the courage to shape their own courses. It looks all lovely colors to me, with you here--so much to get and such an interesting stunt to get to it; so much to do, and such inspirations for the doing of it; such excellent loads to lift at and maybe shoulder. Think, Cordelia, think by all means! That is the most fun there is, and the most we shall either of us get for some time to come if you marry me on sixty dollars a week. Oh dear! There were times when I feared you weren’t going to wait! Those were the worst pinches of the pull. To get tired and have no heart of refuge to fly to--you know that is pretty trying, Cordelia.”

“I know, Peregrine. And to wait with folded hands and not know--it tries the faith. A bunch of roses on my birthday, a bunch of roses on Christmas morning, not a line with either of them! Oh, Peregrine!”

“There! Nobody saw us but the squirrel! ‘Far out of sight, while sorrows still enfold us, lies the fair country where our hearts abide.’ Do you know that hymn, Cordelia? There were days together when it ran in my head. It meant heaven to whoever wrote it, but to me it meant a fifty-dollar-a-month flat and you.”

“Don’t cry, Peregrine!”

“I wasn’t crying. But you must allow a man some sentiment. Are you game for the flat and sixty dollars a week?”

“Let us look at the flat. I hope all the rooms are not cupboards. Do you know that my aunt just passed on the drive in a victoria? Gracious! I have just time to get home before dark and dinner.”

That was the substance of the discourse we had that autumn day. I never mailed that letter I wrote to Cordelia’s father. We concluded that it would not be polite to our parents to elope, and, since we both had very indulgent parents, what was the use! So I broke it to the old man, and he was quite reasonable and let me stay to dinner, and we had champagne. And Cordelia’s mother was kind, too, and though she declared that I was as bad a match as any worldly-wise woman could ask for, she felt that Cordelia had come as nearly to years of marital discretion as women who get married ever come, and that it was certainly time she knew whether I was the ineligible man she wanted or not.

So I told my own parents, too, and my father smiled and said more marriages hereabouts seemed to be spoiled nowadays by too much money than by too little; and my mother shed some tears, but they were not tears of discontent. She has begun to be interested in my trousseau, and keeps suggesting things that I had better buy and have charged to Father, and I hear of her being seen in the neighborhood of auction shops where they sell furniture, and she has counseled me by no means to trench upon Great-aunt Susan’s legacy, which constitutes the total sum of my private fortune. It is not a large legacy, and how I shall ever add anything to it, except Cordelia, I cannot imagine; but I am going to somehow, and meanwhile Cordelia will be an immense asset and make me a rich man at the start.

Perhaps Aunt Susan’s legacy will start on its career as the total fortune of a married man by a period of depletion; for the truth is I am not taking in the whole of sixty dollars a week at the present juncture. It is no great income to command at twenty-seven if one has begun his money-getting at seventeen, but it is a great deal for any one of that age who has spent three or four years in general enlargement of the ideas and experiences in a college and three or four more in learning how to do something that will support life.

I observe that elders are fairly willing to abet the young in getting married if only the adventurers are positively enough set on the adventure and have the courage of their intentions. The thing that the wiser elders won’t do if they can help it is to take responsibility about the intending parties being pleased with their bargain. For the rest, unless the adventure is _too_ rash or premature, or they have violent personal objections, the elders, as far as I see, are apt to be complaisant, and even to push along an affair that is clearly at the stage where it is safe to push it.

The cards are out for three weeks from next Thursday. It was the first our friends in general heard of it, which was as it should be. The flat is hired, and yesterday I got my pay raised five a week. Where there’s a will there’s a way to break it, the lawyers say, but Cordelia and I have passed through that once, and our will is going to probate this time.

I am thinking about what we shall talk about, for talk will have to be our main reliance for entertainment. There’s a fireplace in the flat, and I dare say I shall be seen going home dragging boards and boxes after me like the children one sees in the street, for I don’t know how we shall afford any wood for that fireplace. Wood, I understand, is dear. Never mind; we shall have a fire and sit before it, and talk about everything--about votes for women (which I don’t want, though it matters little), whether we ought to be abstainers (I’d rather not, but it matters little), whether the good English are played out, about the future of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States, whether it isn’t time for the Democrats to shelve Thomas Jefferson and get a new prophet, whether Tammany will ever be killed permanently dead and what then, whether the People have got any sense, whether legislation has an important effect upon divorce, whether the Americans are too much bent on substituting legislation for character, and all those things that one thinks about.

I wonder if she will be willing to talk about those things! Very likely she won’t. It will be more prudent, I think, not to let her see the catalogue of them beforehand. Unless brought up to them gently she might shy. One talks, I find, to another person a good deal according to what is in the other person’s mind.

And for a change we can gossip, and extenuate our neighbor’s faults, first agreeing what they are, which always is a pleasant exercise. And when somebody makes a good book with real meat in it, well served--if any one should--we can read it, and that’s fun, and cheap, and will make more talk. And charities are interesting if one goes at them right (and cheap as things go), and so are politics.

It is such an interesting world if you get the hang at all of what is going on in it, and why, and whither things are tending! I do love to see it roll along and to try to puzzle out why things happen as they do. It will be fun to talk to Cordelia about all these matters. What is there about a woman’s mind--if it is a fairly good one--that it is so extraordinarily stimulating to a man’s mind, so that when you’re too tired to talk to a man you can chatter on amazingly to a woman, provided she’s the right one! They beat drink; they certainly do! They are the great natural stimulant and tonic for mankind.

II

SOME DETAILS OF LIVING

Cordelia and I duly got married (see the newspaper a piece back) and are still married, and, speaking for myself and, as far as observation enables me, for Cordelia, we are still pleased with our audacious experiment. But why should I call it audacious? I am more and more impressed, so far, with the calculating prudence of it, and surely sensible observers must agree with me, and for ten who will think we were rash to get married on sixty dollars a week there will be hundreds, certainly, who will smile at the idea of that being a doubtful income to marry on.

Our maid, Matilda Finn, is a person of considerable talent. I doubt whether two people who aim to subsist on sixty dollars a week are entitled to have a maid at all. I dare say they belong in a boarding-house, or else in a flat where they do their own work and put at least fifty dollars in the bank the first of every month. Oh, delightful thought! Imagine being six hundred dollars to the good at the end of the year, and putting it into some safe gamble that would be the corner-stone of a competence! And if I had only courted Matilda Finn instead of Cordelia it would have been so easy! Do you remember Andrew Cannybee and his first investment in Pullman? But he was living with his mother then and had few expenses. I suppose the money-savers are folks who go without everything they want except money until they cease to want it. That would have been all right if I had wanted Matilda Finn. I know I could have held myself down to self-denial until I could really afford to marry, and by that time I should have got over wanting Matilda. Whereas I never could endure the thought of not wanting Cordelia. I am afraid the Cannybee strain in me isn’t strong enough to do any good. I seem to like life while it is here.

All the same I like Matilda, who is part of life at these presents, and so does Cordelia. Matilda is cheerful, she is clean and indulgent, and she can cook. When food is scarce and dear and you have to have it, you don’t want to have it fooled with by the wasteful or the inexpert. The little that man wants here below he has to have two or three times a day, and it does make a difference how it is fixed up for him. Consider the staples of nourishment--bread, toast, tea, coffee, bacon, eggs, chickens, chops, beefsteak, fish, codfish, oysters, clams, lettuce, rice, beans, milk, and the package foods that some of us eat for breakfast to divert our minds from diet! How various are the dealings of the human mind and hand with these simple alimentary provisions! What grace or defect of human character is there that cannot find its demonstration in the way an egg is dropped on toast! There is as much difference in toast as there is in people; there is a great native difference in eggs, and much individuality; no two slabs of bacon are alike to start with, or are affected quite the same by smoke and other processes of education. When it comes to coffee, what a problem! Leaving out all the coffee that is not coffee at all, consider the horde of coffees that _are_ coffee; their propensity to masquerade under names that do not belong to them, to be blended, and to taste unexpectedly every time you get a new lot!

But give the coffees their due. Nearly all of them are good. It is only that some of them are enough better than others to interest an aspiring spirit which reaches out instinctively in the direction of the highest good for the money. Such a spirit will early recognize that, food being variable, the mind that prepares it should be constant and sagacious in its processes.

I would not have you suppose I am an epicure. I never think much about food unless it is not so good as I think it ought to be, all things considered; or else is better than I expected. There needs to be some standard of nourishment in a family, and in our family of three it has to be adjusted to an expenditure of three dollars a day. Cordelia says that I contribute the standard and the dollars and leave her to furnish the adjustment. That is where Matilda Finn comes in. I asked Mrs. French once if Cordelia could cook--asked her quite casually, and not, of course, as though it was of any consequence. She said yes, that every woman could cook, and that Cordelia could, of course, and that the question was whether any man could live off her cooking. She has taken cooking lessons since then and courses in Domestic Science, which includes cooking, and I think she can do it. But cooking is an agitating job, and I don’t like to have Cordelia agitated. Nor is there any need. I like better to have her stick to her own profession, which is ministering to happiness. I suppose they don’t teach that in the domestic-science courses. Cordelia ministers to Matilda Finn’s happiness, and Matilda cooks and does all the other things that need to be done in a flat, except what Cordelia and I do; and Cordelia ministers to my happiness remarkably. All sorts and conditions of folks Cordelia ministers to: she has captivated her mother’s market-man, with whom she talks meat, poultry, fish, politics, and current events every morning. She knows all his reasons for the high price of meat. “That man,” she said the other day, “can bamboozle me into anything!” Nevertheless, she seems to be getting intimately acquainted with the butcher business and the anatomy of the animals on which we elect to subsist, and the comparative cost and edibleness of their various sections. The spring lamb that we had for dinner the day Caseby dined with us was “a bargain I got off of Mr. Cooper,” who had an oversupply of fore quarters and sold one at a great reduction to young Mrs. Jesup. As a rule, we do not subsist on spring lamb at home in the spring. That seems to be a favorite dinner-party provision, and we still dine out enough to keep up our acquaintance with it. The “lamb” we have is the most neutral of all meats, unexciting, but sufficient for the purpose of nourishment.

Cordelia sings at her work, and that makes me think she must like the life. Perhaps I should say her employments rather than her work. Being away all day, I don’t know very much about them, but at least I hear her singing while she is putting up her hair.

This matter of woman’s work looks important. I wonder what they do all day--girls, that is, like Cordelia. If she had a job it would simplify matters, particularly if it was a remunerated job, for I dare say Cordelia would spend more money if she had it. _I_ could. But it would have to be some kind of an independent home job, like painting or writing or taking in washing. If she went out to work and had any boss but me, it would not be tolerable. Moreover, if she had a job that she was qualified for and was worthy of her talents, she would probably be better at it than I am at mine and earn more at it than I do, and then where would I come in! Think of us both coming home tired from wage-earning! Awful! I am glad she has no job except, as I said before, the great one of ministering to happiness. I seem to be just a poor old-fashioned monopolist, not much farther along than the Stone Age.

But she does keep busy in a way. I hear of her making calls--though she says calls are a queer employment for a lady who lives over a tailor shop--and she goes to see her mother, and my mother, and various girls, and goes to market, and sews a little and reads a little and does charities a good deal, and has girls in to lunch and feeds them on I don’t know what. She says it’s not wise to break with the life you know any more than you have to, and of course that’s so; though neither is it wise to hang on to the life you know when you can’t afford it. The life you know isn’t the only good one even for you. I have come to feel that tremendously since I turned anarchist--to feel that life is a big thing, a bully thing, and that we are fools to cramp it and trim it down too much to fit usage and environment. Friends are very valuable, acquaintance is valuable, a standard of living and a set of associations when once you are used to them are very hard to shift from; but all those things are the accessories of life rather than life itself, and it seems a chicken-hearted sort of prudence that would sacrifice life to its accessories.

This from a man who is as sensitive as I am to the differences in dropped eggs, and feels as strongly as I do about fish-balls and bacon, and who likes caviare when it is really good, and alligator-pears, and pâtés of goose-livers, may sound a little forced; but must it follow that because one sees and admires the trees he cannot see the forest?

Yes, I am glad Cordelia has no money-making job, but I suppose that is no argument against such employments for women in general who need them. _I_, being so gifted in money-getting and commanding the income I do, did not need to have my labors supplemented in the wage-earning line. _My_ need was for assistance in spending our money.

By the way, as I meditate on money and my large appetite for it and the ways of getting it, it occurs to me that there is a new profession--muck-raking. Maybe it’s not new, since nothing is, but at any rate it’s coming along on a good slant just now, is very lively, looks altruistic, and I dare say can be made modestly remunerative; for muck-rakers, of course, like other working folks, must live. More than moderately remunerative it can hardly be without spoiling it, for the great business opportunity in it would be to make a great record as a prosecutor and then be retained for the defense. To me, as a lawyer, that looks good, but there are those who would gibe at it as a sort of blackmail.

Well, there does seem to be a lot of tar in money. Sometimes I despair of ever getting enough to keep an auto on without having to pay some impossibly defiling or enslaving price for it; but I haven’t got to have an auto yet, so I take courage.

Father and Father-in-law both growl at the muck-rakers, as is proper enough for gentlemen of their years and responsibilities, but the muck-rakers look to me like microbes of a very natural and timely kind, lawfully and inevitably produced, and going about a necessary business with a catching sort of enthusiasm. When they beat a bad grab, the anarchist in me insists upon rejoicing, no matter what respect the lawyer in me may feel for clients who appreciate lawyers and pay them suitably.

Father-in-law has sent me three gallons of superior European champagne put up in bottles the usual way, mostly pints. He is a kind man. Why he thinks it wise to cultivate expensive thirsts in Cordelia and me I do not know, but my theory is that he thinks a taste for beverages that we can’t afford will make for abstemiousness. So it will, I dare say. Cordelia says the gallons are just a tribute of affection, unsullied by ulterior purposes of any sort. We are going to ask Father-in-law to dinner, and that is a great tribute, for even reduced to his simplest needs he is expensive to feed.

Naturalists have observed and recorded a tendency in married people to duplication. That is, in some respects, a solemn thought. I understand you can get lots more room in Brooklyn for the same money, and people do it; but to me that’s a much more solemn thought than the other one--too solemn altogether. Up the island there are extraordinary rows and successions of human hives. Cordelia and I catch a Sunday afternoon automobile ride up there once in a while and marvel at them as we pass. One could get a fine detachment up there; though for that matter there is an interesting grade of detachment to be had in Brooklyn. And detachment has its value--breaks habits, brings folks in some ways harder up against the facts of life, invites a new inspection of people, brings various releases and stimulations--but I don’t know that it is a thing that Cordelia and I are disposed to chase very hard for its own sake. We are hard enough up against the facts of life as it is, and we are gregarious people and like companions, and if we got a good detachment would go right to work, I suppose, to mitigate it by new associations. We will never move to Harlem or beyond merely for the sake of pioneering, nor swap associations for the mere benefit of swapping. And yet that’s what the Methodist ministers used to do under the old three-years-in-a-place rule--may be doing it still. It was the intention that they should gather no moss, so the plan was to keep them rolling. To me, now, moss looks very nice, and I wouldn’t mind its adhering. I love old associations and permanence of relation, and my heart is even hospitable to some fixity of condition; but there is plenty to be said in favor of wearing the garments of life loose enough to shed them when they get seriously in the way. One should be enough of a change artist to quit a part he cannot excel in before the scene-shifters shut him out. The predicament of people who haven’t it in them to prosper in the social level they find themselves in, and who are so fettered by the conventions and expectations of that level that they can’t break into another, is very pathetic. We hear plenty about the tragedies of families that sink, but what of the tragedies of those that rise, as when a man makes a raft of money and his sons experiment with leisure, drink, chorus-girls, and divorce; and his daughter, for lack of inviting marital opportunities, is obliged to elope with the chauffeur! That sounds better than eloping with the coachman, as used to happen; but still there is a prejudice against it. Of course advantages--most of them--are advantageous, else civilization wouldn’t get ahead; but, by George! they have their price. If Cordelia and I were a grain less stylish we might be living in a model tenement and saving money. (I wonder if we could get one that would hold Matilda too!) The residents of New York around here where we live are roughly divided into two classes, people who eat in the front basement and are getting rich, and people who are too stylish to eat in the front basement, and have upstairs dining-rooms and butler’s pantries, and are (some of them) getting poor. The receipt for getting rich in this neighborhood is--Eat in the basement! But I’m not sure that it is a reliable receipt. It tends to blight some opportunities. Anyhow, it does not fit the ambitions of the socially ambitious of this generation, to whom eating in the basement would seem to conflict with about all that is delectable in life. Of course basement dining-rooms belong to the habits of forty years ago, and invited the simple life, which now for the most part has been chased into flats. But the truth remains that advantages are bought with a price.

It is harder to get something for nothing than we think it is when we read of wills going to probate. They do go there, and then it is to observe whether the heirs get the money or the money gets the heirs. We don’t take medicine unless we are sick. Money in large chunks is pretty strong medicine, but we take it when it offers without regard to our condition, and it does not always do us good.

Tom Merchant was saying something the other day to the effect that a man could not be of very considerable use in the world until he ceased to be dependent on his work for his living. Of course that is not so, as Lincoln’s case and innumerable others attest, and as new cases keep attesting every day. Nevertheless, the venerable John Bigelow has said something very like what Tom said, and I think there is a slice of truth in it. Money in store is power, and makes for leisure to think and act, and may help enormously, in a crisis, to independence in thought and action. Lincoln was poor, but, after all, he had enough cash in hand to spare the time for the debate with Douglas and for all the politics that followed, up to the time when he began to draw a salary as President.

The trouble with the chaps that come early into ready-made money is that so few of them ever learn enough about common human life, and people, and the elements of the job, to be considerably useful, even if they aspire to be. Still, I think they do better nowadays than they used to. The money-getting school, whatever course you take, is an exacting school. Somehow you have to deliver the goods--some kind of goods that somebody is willing to pay for. I wonder how much the girls miss, those of them who do miss it, by not taking the courses in that school! Of course, they miss some great possibilities of development, but against that you have to measure what they would miss by not being able to do two kinds of things in the same years, and sacrificing what they get as it is, for what they might get as it might be. There comes in the division of work between men and women and the difference in their natural careers. Cordelia as she is, for me.

Cordelia and I are agreed that we will have rhododendrons in our garden. Those in the Park have begun to bloom, and I am excessively pleased with them. They have such a fine Greek name that takes me back to Xenophon’s Anabasis, and such splendid blossoms and such interesting shades of color, and then they bloom in the shade. I respect them most of all for that. To live in the shade and turn out so splendid--well, allegorically speaking, it happens more or less to folks, too. It will cost us something to have a good lot of rhododendrons in our garden, but when it comes to planning for our country place we never spare expense. Why should we? Frugality of imagination is no saving to anybody. Cordelia is less extravagant in that particular than I am, because when I see the men who earn a lot of money I speculate in my mind as to how they do it and whether _I_ could do it, and I usually decide that I shall be able to presently if I have time, and then, naturally, I think what I shall have when I get all that money, and just now it is rhododendrons because they are just coming along. A good deal goes with rhododendrons: hired men, domestic animals, chariots of locomotion; I dare say by the time Cordelia and I get around to have them aeroplanes will have become a reasonable solicitation. But there’s no hurry. The rhododendrons in the Park are lovely, and I dare say there are more in the Bronx (if you can get there), and we have hospitable friends who have them in gardens.

This observing the money-getters and noticing how they do it, and computing how long it will take to learn the trick and acquire the necessary prestige, is all right enough and even useful, but it plagues me when I get my mind too much on it. That’s not really the way to live--and yet, and yet. “The life is more than meat; the body more than raiment,” but, having life, meat comes very handy, and having a body, raiment is convenient. The people who miss it are those who starve life, or overlook it, in their solicitude for meat and motors.