Page:The Genius of America (1923).pdf/138

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puts all that she can lay hands on upon her own back, and yet leaves it more than half uncovered. She has been trained to dress and display herself for the kind of man that he is. But he is not quite equal to the task of maintaining the kind of a woman that she is. In two years or less, he will be single again and bankrupt—or an advertising manager on twenty thousand a year.

I add the alternative; because he may "get by." But a generation with a marked tendency towards the production and heroization of such figures and figurantes should beware of pressing its tendencies too far. "The gods creep up on feet of wool." A spending generation which trades on the moral and material accumulations of its predecessors, presently finds its stock exhausted. And though for a time, by its mastery of "touch" it may still sell water and market wind, in the long run it will not get by with that stuff.