Before Wyatt, leisure had been the thinnest of
exhalations along the very top of society. Since Wyatt, it has got
diffused in greater and greater density through at least the upper
third of it. And for all that magical extension of free time, wrested
from the ceaseless toil with which God cursed Adam, we stand indebted
(and so recently!) to the machinery _set_ going by that spontaneous
explosion of artisan genius in England only a hundred and fifty years
ago, _kept_ going (and faster and faster) by the labor of men, women,
and children behind factory windows, the world over, to-day.

Marie's view of the situation, however, is the usual one. We are
billions of miles from really realizing that leisure is produced by
somebody's work, that just "Being a Good Woman" or "Being a Decent
Fellow" is so far from being an adequate return for the toil of other
people that it is just exactly no return at all. We are billions of
miles from admitting that the virtuous parasite is just as much a
parasite as the vicious parasite:--that the former differs from the
latter in the use of the money but not at all in the matter of getting
it in return for nothing.

Getting something for nothing is the fundamental immorality of the
world. But we don't believe it. There will be a revolution before we
get it into our heads that trying to trade a sweet disposition or an
intelligent appreciation of opera or a proficiency at amateur tennis
for three meals a day is a fraud.

Marie didn't mean to commit a fraud. She just dropped a sentimental,
non-negotiable plugged nickel into the slot-machine of life and drew
out a motor-car and a country place, and was innocently pleased. Such
a wonderful slot-machine! She never saw the laboring multitudes behind
it, past and present multitudes, dead fingers, living fingers, big
men's fingers, little children's fingers, pulling the strings,
delivering the prizes, laying aside the plugged nickel in the treasury
of a remote revenge.

[Illustration: TO CURE A HEADACHE--WORKING-GIRL THERAPY: TAKE A GOOD JOB
AND STIR IT CONSTANTLY FROM BREAKFAST TO SUPPER.]

Perhaps the reason why she didn't catch on to the fact that, instead
of being the world's creditor, she was really inhabiting an almshouse
was that she was so busy.

You see, she not only did things all the time but she had to find and
invent them to do. Her life, even before she was married, was much
more difficult than her brother's, who simply got up in t