At the slightest
opportunity she had always pushed out for luxuries--for better
food, better clothing, more agreeable surroundings. Even in
her worst hours of discouragement she had not really relaxed
in the struggle against rags and dirt. And when moral horror
had been blunted by custom and drink, physical horror had
remained acute. For, human nature being a development upward
through the physical to the spiritual, when a process of
degeneration sets in, the topmost layers, the spiritual, wear
away first--then those in which the spiritual is a larger
ingredient than the material--then those in which the material
is the larger--and last of all those that are purely material.
As life educated her, as her intelligence and her knowledge
grew, her appreciation of luxury had grown apace and her
desire for it. With most human beings, the imagination is a
heavy bird of feeble wing; it flies low, seeing only the
things of the earth. When they describe heaven, it has houses
of marble and streets of gold. Their pretense to sight of
higher things is either sheer pretense or sight at second
hand. Susan was of the few whose fancy can soar. She saw the
earthy things; she saw the things of the upper regions also.
And she saw the lower region from the altitudes of the
higher--and in their perspective.
As she and Brent stood together on the sidewalk before his
house, about to enter his big limousine, his smile told her
that he had read her thought--her desire for such an
automobile as her very own.
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