s of modern leisure the positive character reacts
toward novel activity. It may be a reaction toward Civic Service.
Or toward Self-Support. Or toward an enormous never-before-witnessed
expenditure of intelligent care on the physical and mental education
of children. The positive character, fighting modern facts, creates
new ideals. The character which is neither positive nor negative runs
along as a neutral mixture of the old ideals and of the modern
facts, of child-rearing made amateurish by idling and of idling
made irritable by child-rearing. The negative character--like
Marie's--just yields to the modern facts and is swept along by them
into final irresponsibility and inutility.

But Marie wasn't negative enough--she wasn't _emotional_ enough in her
negativeness--to plunge into _dissipation_. It wasn't in her nature to
do any _plunging_ of any kind. Good, safe, motionless _sponging_ was
her instinct. And she will die in the odor of tubbed and scrubbed
respectability. And if you knew her you would like her very much. She
is charming.

When she and Chunk were married, they went to live in an apartment
appropriate to a rising young man, and Marie's job was on all
occasions to look as appropriate as the apartment.

No shallow cynicism, this! Just plain, bald truth without any wig on
it. The only thing that you could put your finger on that Marie really
did was so to wear clothes and so to give parties as to be the
barometer of her husband's prosperity. And in every city you can see
lots of such barometers giving themselves an artificially high
reading in order to create that "atmosphere" of success which is a
recognized commercial asset.

Chunk was hugely pleased with Marie. She looked good at the dinner
table in the cafe of their apartment building. She knew how to order
the right dishes when they entertained and dined down town. She made
it possible for him to return deftly and engagingly the social
attentions of older people. She completed the "front" of his life, and
he not only supported her but, as Miss Salmon, of Vassar, flippantly
and seriously says, he "sported" her as he might a diamond shirt
stud.

No struggle in Marie's life so far! No _having_ to swim in the cold
water of daily enforced duty or else sink. _No being accustomed to the
disagreeable feel of that water._

She had missed work. That was nothing. She had missed being _hardened_
to work. That was everything.

The first demand ever made on