g inertia of her mind.

Nevertheless she was a nice girl. In fact, she was The Nice Girl. She
was sweet-tempered, sweet-mannered, and sweet-spoken--a perfect dear.
She never did a "bad" thing in her life. And she never ceased from her
career of moral forcing. She wrote to her husband from her mountain
fastness, warning him against high-balls in hot weather. She went
twice a month during the winter to act as librarian for an evening at
a settlement in a district which was inhabited by perfectly
respectable working people but which, while she passed out the books,
she sympathetically alluded to as a "slum."

It is hardly fair, however, to lay the whole explanation of Marie on
her father, her husband, and herself.

A few years ago, in the churchyard of St. Philip's Church at
Birmingham, they set up a tombstone which had fallen down, and they
reinscribed it in honor of the long-neglected memory of the man who
had been resting beneath it for a century and a half. His name was
Wyatt. John Wyatt. He had a good deal to do with making Marie what she
was.

What toil, what tossing nights, what sweating days, what agonized
wrenching of the imagination toward a still unreached idea, have gone
into the making of leisure--for other people!

Wyatt strained toward, and touched, the idea which was the real start
of modern leisure.

In the year 1733, coming from the cathedral town of Lichfield, where
the Middle Ages still lingered, he set up, in a small building near
Sutton Coldfields, a certain machine. That machine inaugurated, and
forever symbolizes, the long and glorious series of mechanical
triumphs which has made a large degree of leisure possible, not for a
few thousand women, as was previously the case, but for millions and
millions of them.

It was only about two feet square. But it accomplished a thing never
before accomplished. It spun the first thread ever spun in the history
of the world without the intervention of human fingers.

On that night woman lost her oldest and most significant title and
function. The Spinster ceased to be.

The mistress and her maid, spinning together in the Hall, their
fingers drawing the roving from the distaff and stretching it out as
the spindle twisted it, were finally on the point of separating
forever.

We all see what Wyatt's machine did to the maids. We all understand
that when he started his mill at Birmingham and hired his working
force of _ten girls_, he prophesied the fact