The Price She Paid | Page 5

we have not stultified them?
With every natural advantage apparently, Mildred's failure to catch a
husband seemed to be somehow her own fault. Other girls, less

endowed than she, were marrying, were marrying fairly well. Why,
then, was Mildred lagging in the market?
There may have been other reasons, reasons of accident--for, in the
higher class matrimonial market, few are called and fewer chosen.
There was one reason not accidental; Hanging Rock was no place for a
girl so superior as was Mildred Gower to find a fitting husband. As has
been hinted, Hanging Rock was one of those upper-middle-class
colonies where splurge and social ambition dominate the community
life. In such colonies the young men are of two classes--those beneath
such a girl as Mildred, and those who had the looks, the manners, the
intelligence, and the prospects to justify them in looking higher
socially--in looking among the very rich and really fashionable. In the
Hanging Rock sort of community, having all the snobbishness of Fifth
Avenue, Back Bay, and Rittenhouse Square, with the added torment of
the snobbishness being perpetually ungratified--in such communities,
beneath a surface reeking culture and idealistic folderol, there is a
coarse and brutal materialism, a passion for money, for luxury, for
display, that equals aristocratic societies at their worst. No one can live
for a winter, much less grow up, in such a place without becoming
saturated with sycophantry. Thus, only by some impossible
combination of chances could there have been at Hanging Rock a
young man who would have appreciated Mildred and have had the
courage of his appreciation. This combination did not happen. In
Mildred's generation and set there were only the two classes of men
noted above. The men of the one of them which could not have
attracted her accepted their fate of mating with second-choice females
to whom they were themselves second choice. The men of the other
class rarely appeared at Hanging Rock functions, hung about the rich
people in New York, Newport, and on Long Island, and would as soon
have thought of taking a Hanging Rock society girl to wife as of
exchanging hundred-dollar bills for twenty-five-cent pieces. Having
attractions acceptable in the best markets, they took them there.
Hanging Rock denounced them as snobs, for Hanging Rock was
virtuously eloquent on the subject of snobbishness--we human
creatures being never so effective as when assailing in others the vice
or weakness we know from lifelong, intimate, internal association with
it. But secretly the successfully ambitious spurners of that suburban

society were approved, were envied. And Hanging Rock was most
gracious to them whenever it got the chance.
In her five years of social life Mildred had gone only with the various
classes of fashionable people, had therefore known only the men who
are full of the poison of snobbishness. She had been born and bred in
an environment as impregnated with that poison as the air of a
kitchen-garden with onions. She knew nothing else. The secret
intention to refuse Stanley Baird, should he propose, was therefore the
more astonishing--and the more significant. From time to time in any
given environment you will find some isolated person, some
personality, with a trait wholly foreign and out of place there. Now it is
a soft voice and courteous manners in a slum; again it is a longing for a
life of freedom and equality in a member of a royal family that has
known nothing but sordid slavery for centuries. Or, in the petty
conventionality of a prosperous middle- or upper-class community you
come upon one who dreams--perhaps vaguely but still longingly--of an
existence where love and ideas shall elevate and glorify life. In spite of
her training, in spite of the teaching and example of all about her from
the moment of her opening her eyes upon the world, Mildred Gower at
twenty-three still retained something of these dream flowers sown in
the soil of her naturally good mind by some book or play or perhaps by
some casually read and soon forgotten article in magazine or
newspaper. We have the habit of thinking only weeds produce seeds
that penetrate and prosper everywhere and anywhere. The truth is that
fine plants of all kinds, vegetable, fruit, and flower of rarest color and
perfume, have this same hardiness and fecundity. Pull away at the
weeds in your garden for a while, and see if this is not so. Though you
may plant nothing, you will be amazed at the results if you but clear a
little space of its weeds--which you have been planting and cultivating.
Mildred--woman fashion--regarded it as a reproach upon her that she
had not yet succeeded in making the marriage everyone, including
herself, predicted for her and expected of her. On the contrary, it was