CHICAGO, _November fifth_.
PRECIOUS FATHER AND EVELYN:--
I know all my letters thus far have been rather no-account. They
were just to let you know that I was well, and interested, and
getting used to things. I loath the city so that I think I must be a
country mouse. Every time I go down in the Elevated, past all the
grimy, slimy, hideous back buildings, something in me turns over and
revolts. I want to be within reach of red leaves, and wheat-stubble,
and fat quail running in the roadside grass. Did the little red and
yellow chrysanthemums do well this year? How about that marigold
border I planted in the kitchen garden?
However, I am going to have a most instructive winter. It was crude
of me {177} to think it, but because mother's friends are mostly
different kinds of reformers, I expected to find them dubs and
scrubs. It seems droll for people who can't live the normal human
life successfully to set themselves up to say that therefore it's
all wrong, and they will show us a better way to play the game. But
only a few of these are that kind of reformers, and they're not
dubby and scrubby at all! Some of them are just reformers from the
teeth out. They're merely amusing themselves.
Mother is n't playing, however. She's tremendously in earnest. Being
a reformer is n't fattening. She keeps back no pound of flesh. She
is so thin and tense and nervous, so obsessed with her own ideas,
that it worries me some times. I feel as if I lived perpetually in
the room with an electric fan. I have {178} been to her classes
several times. She has a certain eager eloquence, a real appeal,
that will always gain her a hearing. I wish she could keep her
neckties straight, but that is a trifle.
Do you remember old Mrs. Knowles saying that she loved to sit at the
window and "see the people going pro and con in the street?" That is
my present occupation! These people do a tremendous amount of "going
pro and con" in the world of the mind. I have been hearing a vast
deal of feminist discussion, owing to the appearance of some new
books in that line. Can you see why, if nature has spent some
thousands of years making women "anabolic, or conservers of energy,"
they should try to reverse the process in a decade and become even
as men, who are "katabolic, or dispensers of energy," just because a
stray thinker {179} supposes it would make them more interesting if
they all had a business life and dispensed that energy downtown? It
seems to me ill-advised to defy nature wholesale. I am willing to
work for bread, or for the love of work--but not to oblige illogical
theorists!
I'm glad I don't have to reconcile all the different views I hear!
One person will argue that woman's work in the home is so
complicated and taxing that it all ought to be done for her by
specialists, while she goes downtown and becomes some other kind of
specialist herself. This is the school of thought to which mother
belongs. One or two of its leaders are terribly clever--and mother is
rapturously sure that wisdom was born with them! She is so happy to
be advocating and expounding their ideas! I find this discipleship
pathetic. One does n't deny that they {180} have visions,--mother has
them also,--but to me their visions are not divine or beautiful.
The next person will be a reactionary, and say that we are going
straight to destruction because some women are thrown into
industrial competition with men.
A third will be sure that, because modern life with all its
industrial developments outside the home has drawn many women away
from home life, therefore all women ought to be thrown out of their
homes in a bunch and hustle for themselves in the market-place.
There's no longer anything to do at home, and if they stay there
they will get fat and lazy and parasitic. I argued about this half
the evening with an apple-faced youth of twenty-five who is still
supported by his mother. You would have supposed, to {181} hear him,
that feminine hands and feet were going to atrophy and fall off from
disuse, and that we should turn into some kind of chubby white grub
with mouths perpetually demanding to be fed.
I don't deny that there are indolent women in the world, but I
certainly never saw any parasites in the college set at Powelton.
Somebody will have to "show me" before I can get up any heat of
conviction on the subject!
No longer anything to do at home! It has kept me so busy putting one
attenuated little reformer-lady's flat to rights and training a cook
for her that I have n't had a minute, yet, to see about those
courses I meant to take at the University! I shall get around to
them presently, I hope.
Mother took the flat before I {182} arrived, and the packers brought
her furniture from storage and unpacked it, and set it about
according to their fancy, and cleaned up the mess and departed. We
moved our trunks out the next morning. Mother went up and down and
to and fro, as unsettled as the Cat that Walked. Finally she
demanded of me, "Marvel, what ails this flat?" and I said, "Why,
mother, the colors are all wrong and it is n't cozy."
She threw up her hands in despair. "Is coziness to be the end of our
living?" she demanded; and I said, "It is."
You see, she can explain adorably about beauty in the home, but she
had n't known any better than to leave the tinting to the
kalsominer.--"Kalsomine is his business. He ought to know better
than I," she said. She has such blind faith in specialists,--There
{183} resulted a red dining-room, a terrible green living-room, and
dark lavender bedrooms! No wonder poor little mother was miserable!
Getting it put right was messy, deplorable, and expensive beyond
words; but it is all nice tans now, with charming chintz draperies
and chair-covers. I did the upholstering myself, and it is n't half
bad.
Mother does n't like ugly things, nor get them of her own free will,
but she is obsessed to accept the advice of everybody who pretends
to be a specialist, and they "do" her frightfully. It is one of the
penalties of being a Superwoman.
Getting a cook required diplomacy. It is a point of honor with
mother to take meals in restaurants or buy delicatessen stuff. She
was in the hospital two months with inflammation of the liver last
winter, and dyspepsia makes {184} half her days hideous. If people
will live on indigestible ideas, instead of home cooking, I'm afraid
it's what they must expect! I freely admit that I can't combat
mother's ideas, as ideas,--I'm not clever enough,--but she does n't
know how to be comfortable, which is to be efficient. She is rabidly
against kitchens, but arithmetic demonstrates that here, in Chicago,
this winter, it will cost less, and be more healthful to have a maid
for the season instead of dragging ourselves out in the snow to eat
thirty-cent breakfasts and fifty-cent luncheons and seventy-five
cent dinners, and pay a woman for coming to clean. I argue that, so
long as the Redeemed Form of Society has n't arrived, we are n't
disloyal to it by doing this!
Myra Ann has learned to make Evelyn's beef-tea and mutton-broth.
{185} Mother needs them badly. Then I discovered that eggs have
always disagreed with her, but she went right on eating them because
she thought them an "ideal food," and that if her stomach was n't
sufficiently standardized to appreciate them, it ought to be! I call
that heroic, if it is droll. Idiosyncrasy is something for which
mother's creed makes no allowance. We now have an attractive set of
eggless breakfasts.--Does all this sound like a model house keeper
writing to a domestic journal? Evelyn knows I have a little right to
throw bouquets at myself, for I was n't born a housekeeper--but
housekeepers _can_ be made!
Seems to me, if you ought to standardize an individual's diet, as
mother thinks, similar arguments apply to his clothes, his features,
his body, his mind, his soul. There's no logical place to {186}
stop. Yet we know that diversity, not similarity, is the end nature
is always seeking in evolution. Of course, if you are going to buck
all the natural laws, that's different!
My country brain gets tired in such a menagerie of ideas. In our own
life at home, there is comfort, peace, sufficient stimulus,
development; this life is exciting, but barren of something that I
will call soil to grow in, because I don't know any better word. Of
course it is great fun for me to come in contact with so many
different kinds of minds and hear them emit their theories. Only,
somehow, the theorists lack reality to me. Do I make myself clear?
I hope this will give you a notion of what I'm doing and thinking,
and that you'll know I'm really having a beautiful time. I miss you
both {187} horribly, though. I will tell about some of the people in
my next letter. I'm acting as mother's secretary just now. She
really needs one, and it's interesting work.
Ever and always,
Your loving child,
MARVEL.