iving a return for it. Second, because he hasn't much time for it.

On the other hand, we see the hobo who won't work ruining himself on
the luxury of stable floors and of free-lunch counters, just as
thoroughly as any nobleman who won't work can ever ruin himself on the
luxury of castles and of game preserves.

It is clearly the habitual enjoyment of either grouse or ham
sandwiches, of either eider down or straw, _without service rendered
and without fatigue endured_, that ultimately desiccates the moral
character and drains it of all capacity for effort.

Marie was enervated not by her luxury but by her failure to _pay_ for
her luxury. She wouldn't have had to pay much. Her luxury was petty.
But she paid nothing. And her failure to pay was just as big as if her
luxury had been bigger. Getting three thousand a year in return for
nothing leaves you morally just as bankrupt as if you had got three
million.

Marie came to her abdication of life's _greatest_ effort not by
wearing too many clothes or by eating too many foods but by becoming
accustomed to getting clothes and foods and all other things without
the _smallest_ effort.

She had given her early, plastic, formative years to acquiring the
_habit_ of effortless enjoyment, and when the time for making an
effort came, the effort just wasn't in her.

Her complete withdrawal from the struggle for existence had at last,
in her negative, non-resistive mind, atrophied all the instincts of
that struggle, including finally the instinct for reproduction.

The instinct for reproduction is intricately involved in the struggle
for existence. The individual struggles for perpetuation, for
perpetuation in person, for perpetuation in posterity. Work, the
perpetuation of one's own life in strain and pain; work, the clinging
to existence in spite of its blows; work, the inuring of the
individual to the penalties of existence, is linked psychologically to
the power and desire for continued racial life. The individual, the
class, which struggles no more will in the end reproduce itself no
more. In not having had to conquer life, it has lost its will to
live.

The detailed daily reasons for this social law stand clear in Marie's
life. It is a strong law. Its triumph in Marie could have been
thwarted only by the presence in her of a certain other social law.
Authority!

The woman who is coerced by Authority, the woman who is operated by
ideals introduced into her from without