n
one could make for oneself, assuredly does show a pitiful lack of
self-reliance, a melancholy lack of self-respect. But for men or women
all their lives used to luxury and with no ability whatever at earning
money--for such persons to marry money in order to save themselves from
the misery and shame that poverty means to them is the most natural,
the most human action conceivable. The man or the woman who says he or
she would not do it, either is a hypocrite or is talking without
thinking. You may in honesty criticize and condemn a social system that
suffers men and women to be so crudely and criminally miseducated by
being given luxury they did not earn. But to condemn the victims of
that system for acting as its logic compels is sheer folly or sheer
phariseeism.

Would Mildred Gower have married for money? As the weeks fled, as the
bank account dwindled, she would have grasped eagerly at any rich man
who might have offered himself--no matter how repellent he might have
been. She did not want a bare living; she did not want what passes
with the mass of middle-class people for comfort. She wanted what she
had--the beautiful and spacious house, the costly and fashionable
clothing, the servants, the carriages and motors, the thousand and one
comforts, luxuries, and vanities to which she had always been used. In
the brain of a young woman of poor or only comfortably off family the
thoughts that seethed in Mildred Gower's brain would have been so many
indications of depravity. In Mildred Gower's brain they were the
natural, the inevitable, thoughts. They indicated everything as to her
training, nothing as to her character. So, when she, thinking only of
a rich marriage with no matter whom, and contrasting herself with the
fine women portrayed in the novels and plays, condemned herself as
shameless and degraded, she did herself grave injustice.

But no rich man, whether attractive or repulsive, offered. Indeed, no
man of any kind offered. Instead, it was her mother who married.

A widower named James Presbury, elderly, with an income of five to six
thousand a year from inherited wealth, stumbled into Hanging Rock to
live, was impressed by the style the widow Gower maintained, believed
the rumor that her husband had left her better off than was generally
thought, proposed, and was accepted. And two years and a month after
Henry Gower's death his widow became Mrs. James Presbury--and ceased to
veil from her ne