Читать книгу The Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald онлайн

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“You’ve brought it on yourselves,” insisted Amory. “You people never make concessions until they’re wrung out of you.”

“What people?”

“Your class; the class I belonged to until recently; those who by inheritance or industry or brains or dishonesty have become the moneyed class.”

“Do you imagine that if that road-mender over there had the money he’d be any more willing to give it up?”

“No, but what’s that got to do with it?”

The older man considered.

“No, I’ll admit it hasn’t. It rather sounds as if it had though.”

“In fact,” continued Amory, “he’d be worse. The lower classes are narrower, less pleasant and personally more selfish—certainly more stupid. But all that has nothing to do with the question.”

“Just exactly what is the question?”

Here Amory had to pause to consider exactly what the question was.

“When life gets hold of a brainy man of fair education,” began Amory slowly, “that is, when he marries he becomes, nine times out of ten, a conservative as far as existing social conditions are concerned. He may be unselfish, kind-hearted, even just in his own way, but his first job is to provide and to hold fast. His wife shoos him on, from ten thousand a year to twenty thousand a year, on and on, in an enclosed treadmill that hasn’t any windows. He’s done! Life’s got him! He’s no help! He’s a spiritually married man.”