of Marie into it cost her
father and her husband prodigious toil and was a great pleasure to
them. Marie belonged to the Leisure Class. Socially, she was therefore
distinctly superior to her father and her husband.

[Illustration: WORK? FOR MARIE? FOR MY DAUGHTER? SHOCKING!]

President Thomas of Bryn Mawr had Marie in mind when she said:

"By the leisured class we mean in America the class whose men work
harder than any other men in the excitement of professional and
commercial rivalry, but whose women constitute the only leisured
class we have and the most leisured class in the world."

Marie's father wasn't so very rich, either. He was engaged in a
business so vividly competitive that Marie's brother was hurried
through college as fast as possible and brought into the game at
twenty-two with every nerve stretched taut.

Nothing like that was expected of Marie. She was brought up to
think that leisure was woman's natural estate. Work, for any girl,
she regarded as an accident due to the unexpected and usually
reprehensible collapse of the males of the poor girl's family.

This view of the matter gave Marie, _unconsciously to herself_, what
morality she had. Hard drinking, "illegitimate" gambling, and
excessive dissipations of all sorts are observed commonly to have a
prejudicial effect on male efficiency and on family prosperity.
Against all "vices," therefore (although she didn't catch the
"therefore"), Marie was a Moral Force of a million angel-power.

Aside from "vices," however, all kinds of conduct looked much alike
to her. Ethics is the rules of the game, the decencies of the struggle
for existence. Marie had no part in the struggle. She violated its
decencies without being at all aware of it.

All the way, for instance, from stealing a place in the line in front
of a box-office window ahead of ten persons who were there before her,
up the tiny scale of petty aggressions within her narrow reach to the
cool climax of spending three months every summer in a pine-wood
mountain resort (thus depriving her city-bound husband of the personal
companionship which was the one best thing she had to give him in
return for what he gave her), she was as competent a little grafter as
the town afforded.

But she was a perfectly logical one. Her family had trained her to
deadhead her way through life and she did it. Finally she went beyond
their expectations. They hadn't quite anticipated all of the sweetly
undeviatin