him that he had not been. She pulled
absently a loose lock of hair--a little-girl trick that came back to her
in moments of abstraction--and looked down at her feet. When she looked
up, it was to say with a bewildered air, "But a man has to earn his
living."

Rankin made a gesture of impatience, and stopped working to answer this
remark. "A living isn't hard to earn. Any healthy man can do that. It's
earning food for his vanity, or his wife's, that kills the average man.
It's coddling his moral cowardice that takes the heart out of him. Don't
you remember what Emerson says--Melton's always quoting it--'Most of our
expense is for conformity to other men's ideas? It's for cake that the
average man runs in debt.' He must have everything that anyone else has,
whether he wants it or not. A house ever so much bigger and finer than
he needs, with ever so many more things in it than belong there. He must
keep his wife idle and card-playing because other men's wives are. He
must have his children do what everyone else's children do, whether it's
bad for their characters or not. Ah! the children! That's the worst of
it all! To bring them up so that these futile complications will be
essentials of life to them! To teach them that health and peace of mind
are not too high a price for a woman to pay for what is called social
distinction, and that a man must--if he can get it in no other way--pay
his self-respect and the life of his individuality for what is called
success--"

Lydia broke in with a sophisticated amusement at his heat. "Why, you're
talking about Newport, or the Four Hundred of New York--if there is any
such thing! The rest of America--why, any European would say we're as
primitive as Aztecs! They do say so! Endbury's not complicated. Good
gracious! A little, plain, middle-western town, where everybody that is
anybody knows everybody else!"

"No; it's not complicated compared with European standards, but it's
more so than it was. Why, in Heaven's name, should it strain every nerve
to make itself as complicated as possible as fast as it can? We're free
yet--we're not Europeans so shaken down into a social rut that only a
red revolution can get us out of it. Why can't we decide on a
rational--" He broke off to say, gloomily: "The devil of it is that we
don't decide anything. We just slide along thinking of something else.
If people would only give, just once in their lives, the same amount of
serious reflection to wh