Said you met old codgers that took care of their own furnaces, just as
you would in a town of five thousand inhabitants."
"Yes, that's all very well," said his wife; "but they wouldn't be nice
people. Nice people want to live nicely. And so they live beyond their
means or else they scrimp and suffer. I don't know which is worst."
"But there is no obligation to do either?" I asked.
"Oh yes, there is," she returned. "If you've been born in a certain way,
and brought up in a certain way, you can't get out of it. You simply
can't. You have got to keep in it till you drop. Or a woman has."
"That means the woman's husband, too," said Mr. Makely, with his wink for
me. "Always die together."
In fact, there is the same competition in the social world as in the
business world; and it is the ambition of every American to live in some
such house as the New York house; and as soon as a village begins to
grow into a town, such houses are built. Still, the immensely greater
number of the Americans necessarily live so simply and cheaply that such
a house would be almost as strange to them as to an Altrurian.
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