No wonder we take
our amusements sadly, and that so many people find dinners heavy and
parties stupid. Our economy leaves no place for amusements; we
merely add them to the burden of a life already full. The world is
still a little off the track as to what is really useful.
I confess that the morning is a very good time to read a novel, or
anything else which is good and requires a fresh mind; and I take it
that nothing is worth reading that does not require an alert mind.
I suppose it is necessary that business should be transacted; though
the amount of business that does not contribute to anybody's comfort
or improvement suggests the query whether it is not overdone. I know
that unremitting attention to business is the price of success, but
I don't know what success is. There is a man, whom we all know, who
built a house that cost a quarter of a million of dollars, and
furnished it for another like sum, who does not know anything more
about architecture, or painting, or books, or history, than he cares
for the rights of those who have not so much money as he has. I
heard him once, in a foreign gallery, say to his wife, as they stood
in front of a famous picture by Rubens: "That is the Rape of the
Sardines!" What a cheerful world it would be if everybody was as
successful as that man! While I am reading my book by the fire, and
taking an active part in important transactions that may be a good
deal better than real, let me be thankful that a great many men are
profitably employed in offices and bureaus and country stores in
keeping up the gossip and endless exchange of opinions among mankind,
so much of which is made to appear to the women at home as
"business.
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