To his way of thinking this was failure for an American. I suspect his philosophy working in me was at least partially responsible for my revolt against the kind of security I had achieved on _The Chautauquan_. I was a hired girl.
But in the society where I found myself in Paris there was no such contempt for the fixed job. On the contrary, it was something for which you were responsible, to which you owed an obligation. Serious workers in Paris seemed to me to give to the job the same kind of loyalty that serious men and women in America gave to the businesses they owned. You respected yourself and were respected in proportion to your fidelity to it. You might be advanced, but more probably not. Opportunity did not grow on every bush as at home, and if it came a Frenchman’s way he weighed it—at home you seized it, trusting to luck. Here luck seemed to me to have little or no standing in a business enterprise, big as it counted in the lotteries in which everybody took part. To my surprise I found these people, working so busily and constantly, were not restless like the Americans; nor were they generally envious. I had a feeling that my concierge, who never had been across the Seine to the Right Bank, who lived in a room almost filled by her huge bed and its great feather puffs, who must have looked long at a sou before she spent it, would not have changed places with anybody in Paris. Were not the lodgers on whom she kept so strict a watch kind, generous, and regular with fees? Had she not friends in the street? Might she not win a slice of a fortune one day from the fraction of a lottery ticket which she annually found a way to buy? And who had so magnificent a cat? The pride of the House. What more could she ask?
Certainly there was more interest in the tasks, less restlessness, less envy, than in the same class in America. Was it my father’s philosophy which made the difference? Was it your duty if you were poor to struggle to be well-to-do, and if well-to-do struggle to be rich? It meant you were always trying to be somebody else. If it was your duty to be discontented, could you escape envy? Was it not necessary, if you were to keep yourself up to the effort, to feed yourself on envy as in war men must be fed on hate if they are to kill with vigor and gusto?