Albert, the Austrian waiter, explained to Susan why it was that
her popularity did the house apparently so little
good--explained with truth where she suspected kind-hearted
plotting, that she had arrested its latterly swift-downward
slide. She was glad to hear what he had to say, as it was most
pleasant to her vanity; but she could not get over the
depression of the central fact--she was not making the sort of
business to justify asking Lange for more than board and lodging;
she was not in the way of making the money that was each
day more necessary, as her little store dwindled.
The question of getting money to live on is usually dismissed
in a princely way by writers about human life. It is in
reality, except with the few rich, the ever-present
question--as ever-present as the necessity of breathing--and it
is not, like breathing, a matter settled automatically. It
dominates thought; it determines action. To leave it out of
account ever, in writing a human history, is to misrepresent
and distort as utterly as would a portrait painter who
neglected to give his subject eyes, or a head, even. With the
overwhelming mass of us, money is at all times all our lives
long the paramount question--for to be without it is
destruction worse than death, and we are almost all perilously
near to being without it. Thus, airily to pass judgment upon
men and women as to their doings in getting money for
necessaries, for what the compulsion of custom and habit has
made necessaries to them--airily to judge them for their doings
in such dire straits is like sitting calmly on shore and
criticizing the conduct of passengers and sailors in a
stormbeset sinking ship.
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