’It may be all right for Marietta Mortimer to kill herself body and soul by inches to keep what bores her to death to have—­a social position in Endbury’s two-for-a-cent society, but, for the Lord’s sake, why do they make such a howling and yelling just at the tree when Lydia’s got the tragically important question to decide as to whether that’s what she wants?  It’s like expecting her to do a problem in calculus in the midst of an earthquake.’

And the following chapter is a graphic presentation as to how Lydia made her choice “in perfect freedom”—­oh, the frightful sarcasm of the phrase—­during the excitement of the wedding preparations and under the pressure of expensive gifts and the ideas of over enthusiastic “society” friends.

Lydia now began her own “squirrel-cage” existence, even her husband urges her into extravagance in spite of her protest by saying, “Nothing’s too good for you.  And besides, it’s an asset.  The mortgage won’t be so very large.  And if we’re in it, we’ll just have to live up to it.  It’ll be a stimulus.”

One of the sane characters of the book is dear, lovable, gruff Mr. Melton, who is Lydia’s godfather, and her final awakening is largely due to him.  One day he finds Lydia’s mother upstairs sick-a-bed, and thus breaks forth to his godchild: 

’About your mother—­I know without going upstairs that she is floored with one or another manifestation of the great disease of social-ambitionitis.  But calm yourself.  It’s not so bad as it seems when you’ve got the right doctor, I’ve practiced for thirty years among Endbury ladies.  They can’t spring anything new on me.  I’ve taken your mother through doily fever induced by the change from tablecloths to bare tops, through portiere inflammation, through afternoon tea distemper, through art-nouveau prostration and mission furniture palsy, not to speak of a horrible attack of acute insanity over the necessity of having her maids wear caps.  I think you can trust me, whatever dodge the old malady is working on her.’

And later in speaking of Lydia’s sister he affirms: 

’Your sister Marietta is not a very happy woman.  She has too many of your father’s brains for the life she’s been shunted into.  She might be damming up a big river with a finely constructed concrete dam, and what she is giving all her strength to is trying to hold back a muddy little trickle with her bare hands.  The achievement of her life is to give on a two-thousand-a-year income the appearance of having five thousand like your father.  She does it; she’s a remarkably forceful woman, but it frets her.  She ought to be in better business, and she knows it, though she won’t admit it.’

Oh, the pity of it, the woe of it, the horror of it, for it is one of the curses of our present day society and is one of the causes of many a man’s and woman’s physical and mental ruin.  In the words of our author elsewhere: