n
that explanation to the next couple, it vanishes. Everybody runs about
trying to find it. The waiter runs about trying to find the gen'l'man
to pay for the undrunk drinks back in the Tea Room. Frank, being the
only member of the party who hasn't been drinking, can't help seeing
what the waiter means. He pays the bill. Then he exerts himself like a
sheep-dog and runs the whole crowd down the corridor and out into a
couple of taxicabs. The air reminds them of unsatisfied appetites.
Conjugal problems are things of the past. As the taxicabs jump out
from the curb to the street-center everybody's head is out of window
and everybody's voice is saying "The Suddington," "The Gruenewurst,"
"Max's," "The Royal Gorge," "Perinique's."

The revulsion from empty leisure in the direction of full-every-night
leisure is balanced to some extent by a revulsion toward activity of a
useful sort. This latter revulsion has two phases: Economic
Independence, which has been spoken of in former chapters; Social
Service and Citizenship, which will be spoken of in the next chapter.

Which one of these two revulsions will be the stronger? If it is the
one toward useful activity, we shall see a dam erected against the
current which, in carrying women out of the struggle for existence,
carries them out of the world's mental life. If it is the one toward
frivolity, we shall see simply an acceleration of that current and a
quicker and larger departure from all those habits of toil and of
service which produce power and character.

* * * * *

With marriage, of course, Marie had a certain opportunity to get back
into life. She had before her at least fifteen years of real work. And
it would have been work of the realest sort. Effort--to and beyond all
other effort! The carrying of new life in fear, the delivery of it in
torture, the nourishing of it in relinquishment of all the world's
worldliness, the watching over it in sleeplessness, the healing of its
sickness in heart-sickness, the bringing of it, with its body strong,
its mind matured, up into the world of adults, up into the struggle
for existence! What a work!

But what a preparation for it had Marie!

She flinched from it. The inertia of her mind carried her to the
ultimate logic of her life. Along about the time of her marriage she
began to cease to be the typical normal girl of her type.

She became a woman of the future--_of her type_.

From the fact