The Worry of the Squirrel Cage : Part 3

Quit Your Worrying!
by George Wharton James

(Page 14 of 23)

But you must understand. Can't we somehow all stop - now! And start over again! You get muslin curtains and not mend your lace ones, and Mother stop fussing about whom to invite to that party - that's going to cost more than he can afford, Father says - it makes me sick to be costing him so much. And not fuss about having clothes just so - and Paul have our house built little and plain, so it won't be so much work to take care of it and keep it clean. I would so much rather look after it myself than to have him kill himself making money so I can hire maids that you can't - you say yourself you can't - and never having any time to see him. Perhaps if we did, other people might, and we'd all have more time to like things that make us nicer to like.

And when her sister tried to comfort her she continued:

'You do see what I mean! You see how dreadful it is to look forward to just that - being so desperately troubled over things that don't really matter - and - and perhaps having children, and bringing them to the same thing - when there must be so many things that do matter!'

Then, to show how perfectly her sister understood, the author makes that wise and perceptive woman exclaim:

'Mercy! Dr. Melton's right! She's perfectly wild with nerves! We must get her married as soon as ever we can!'

Lydia gives a reception. Here is part of the description:

Standing as they were, tightly pressed in between a number of different groups, their ears were assaulted by a disjointed mass of stentorian conversation that gave a singular illusion as if it all came from one inconceivably voluble source, the individuality of the voices being lost in the screaming enunciation which, as Mrs. Sandworth had pointed out, was a prerequisite of self-expression under the circumstances.

They heard: 'For over a month and the sleeves were too see you again at Mrs. Elliott's I'm pouring there from four I've got to dismiss one with plum-colored bows all along five dollars a week and the washing out and still impossible! I was there myself all the time and they neither of thirty-five cents a pound for the most ordinary ferns and red carnations was all they had, and we thought it rather skimpy under the brought up in one big braid and caught down with at Peterson's they were pink and white with - ' ... 'Oh, no, Madeleine! that was at the Burlingame's.' Mrs. Sandworth took a running jump into the din and sank from her brother's sight, vociferating: 'The Petersons had them of old gold, don't you remember, with little - '

The doctor, worming his way desperately through the masses of femininity, and resisting all attempts to engage him in the local fray, emerged at length into the darkened hall where the air was, as he told himself in a frenzied flight of imagination, less like a combination of a menagerie and a perfume shop. Here, in a quiet corner, sat Lydia's father alone. He held in one hand a large platter piled high with wafer-like sandwiches, which he was consuming at a Gargantuan rate, and as he ate, he smiled to himself.

'Well, Mr. Ogre,' said the doctor, sitting down beside him with a gasp of relief; 'let a wave-worn mariner into your den, will you?'

Provided with an auditor, Judge Emery's smile broke into an open laugh. He waved the platter toward the uproar in the next rooms: 'A boiler factory ain't in it with woman, lovely woman, is it?' he put it to his friend.

'Gracious powers! There's nothing to laugh at in that exhibition!' the doctor reproved him, with an acrimonious savagery. 'I don't know which makes me sicker; to stay in there and listen to them, or come out here and find you thinking they're funny!'

They are funny!' insisted the Judge tranquilly. 'I stood by the door and listened to the scraps of talk I could catch, till I thought I should have a fit. I never heard anything funnier on the stage.'

'Looky here, Nat,' the doctor stared up at him angrily, 'they're not monkeys in a zoo, to be looked at only on holidays and then laughed at! They're the other half of a whole that we're half of, and don't you forget it! Why in the world should you think it funny for them to do this tomfool trick all winter and have nervous prostration all summer to pay for it? You'd lock up a man as a dangerous lunatic if he spent his life so. What they're like, and what they do with their time and strength concerns us enough sight more than what the tariff is, let me tell you.'

'I admit that what your wife is like concerns you a whole lot!' The Judge laughed good-naturedly in the face of the little old bachelor. 'Don't commence jumping on the American woman so! I won't stand it! She's the noblest of her sex!'

'Do you know why I am bald?' said Dr. Melton, running his hand over his shining dome.

'If I did, I wouldn't admit it,' the Judge put up a cautious guard, 'because I foresee that whatever I say will be used as evidence against me.'

'I've torn out all my hair in desperation at hearing such men as you claim to admire and respect and wish to advance the American woman. You don't give enough thought to her - real thought - from one year's end to another to know whether you think she has an immortal soul or not!'

Later Lydia's husband insists that they give a dinner.

About the Author

George Wharton James (1858 - 1923) was a prolific popular lecturer and journalist, writing more than 40 books and many articles and pamphlets on California and the American Southwest. James was born in Lincolnshire, England. He was ordained as a Methodist minister and came to the United States in 1881, serving in parishes in Nevada and southern California.