The Price She Paid | Page 9

Mildred
awakened to the truth of their plight. A few months at most, and they

would have to give up that beautiful house which had been her home
all her life. She tried to grasp the meaning of the facts as her
intelligence presented them to her, but she could not. She had no
practical training whatever. She had been brought up as a rich man's
child, to be married to a rich man, and never to know anything of the
material details of life beyond what was necessary in managing
servants after the indifferent fashion of the usual American woman of
the comfortable classes. She had always had a maid; she could not even
dress herself properly without the maid's assistance. Life without a
maid was inconceivable; life without servants was impossible.
She wandered through the house, through the grounds. She said to
herself again and again: ``We have got to give up all this, and be
miserably poor-- with not a servant, with less than the tenement people
have.'' But the words conveyed no meaning to her. She said to herself
again and again: ``I must rouse myself. I must do something. I
must--must-- must!'' But she did not rouse, because there was nothing
to rouse. So far as practical life was concerned she was as devoid of
ideas as a new-born baby.
There was but the one hope--marriage, a rich marriage. It is the habit of
men who can take care of themselves and of women who are securely
well taken care of to scorn the woman or the helpless-bred man who
marries for money or even entertains that idea. How little imagination
these scorners have! To marry for a mere living, hardly better than 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 new husband the truth as to her
affairs.
Mildred had thought that, than the family quarrels incident to settling
her father's estate, human nature could no lower descend. She was now
to be disillusioned. When a young man or a young woman blunders
into a poor marriage in trying to make a rich one, he or she is usually
withheld from immediate and frank expression by the timidity of youth.
Not so the elderly man or woman. As we grow older, no mat- ter how
timidly conventional we are by nature, we become,