Chapter VII THE LURE OF THE MATERIAL:  BEAUTY SPEAKS FORITSELF

The true meaning of money yet remains to be popularly explained and comprehended.  When each individual realizes for himself that this thing primarily stands for and should only be accepted as a moral due-that it should be paid out as honestly stored energy, and not as a usurped privilege-many of our social, religious, and political troubles will have permanently passed.  As for Carrie, her understanding of the moral significance of money was the popular understanding, nothing more.  The old definition:  " Money :  something everybody else has had and I must get,” would have expressed her understanding of it thoroughly.  Some of it she now held in her hand-two soft, green ten-dollar bills-and she felt that she was immensely better off for the having of them.  It was something that was power in itself.  One of her order of mind would have been content to be cast away upon a desire island with a bundle of money, and only the long strain of starvation would have taught her that in some cases it could have no value.  Even then she would have had no conception of the relative value of the thing; her one thought would, undoubtedly, have concerned the pity of having so much power and the inability to use it.

The poor girl thrilled as she walked away from Drouet.  She felt ashamed in part because she had been weak enough to take it, but her need was so dire, she was still glad.  Now she would have a nice jacket!  Now she would buy a nice pair button shoes.  She would get stockings too, and skirts, and, and-until already, as in matter of her desires, twice the purchasing power of her bills.  She conceived a true estimate of Drouet.  To her, and indeed to all the world, he was a nice, good-hearted, as in the matter of her prospective salary, she had got beyond, in her desires, twice the purchasing power of her bills.

She conceived a true estimate of Drouet.  To her, and indeed to all the world, he was a nice, good-hearted man.  There was nothing evil in the fellow.  He gave her the want.  He would not have given the same amount to a poor young man, but we must not forget that a poor young man could not, in the nature of things, have appealed to him like a poor young girl.  Femininity affected his feelings.  He was the creature of an inborn desire.  Yet no beggar could have caught his eye and said, " My God, mister, I’m starving,” but he would gladly have handed out what was considered the proper portion to give beggars and though no more about it.  There would have been no speculation, no philosophizing.  He had no mental process in him worthy the dignity of either of those terms.  In his good clothes and fine health, he was a merry, unthinking moth of the lamp.  Deprived of his position, and struck by a few of the involved and baffling forces which sometimes play upon man, he would have been as helpless as Carrie-as helpless, as nonunderstanding, as pitiable, if you will, as she.