Out of the chaotic writhings of her growing restlessness she sought and vaguely began to see the dim path which would lead, she thought, to a broader view of the scene of which she was a part. Here and there she heard the voice of one crying out against the monotony, the tastelessness, the vulgarity, the rule by the mob, the lowering faces everywhere. She tried to talk once or twice with Jimmie when they sat at home on the occasional evenings they were not scheduled to dine or dance. She desisted when he laughed at her worries and jocularly remarked: “You cannot serve Rolls-Royce and Mammon!” He repeated the phrase with a satisfied smile, adding: “Not so bad, eh?” Thereafter, she never ventured to mention her thoughts to him again.
One night they invited a young professor, Henry Meekins, to dine with them. He had just returned from a lengthy visit to China and had had the extraordinary good sense to go to the Orient without very many preconceived notions regarding unquestioned perfectness of everything Western and particularly all things American. At dinner he ventured to express the opinion that China, though unblessed with modern plumbing, was more interesting, more filled with beauty and romance, than New York, which he found to be clean and with excellent plumbing but dull and blatant and ugly. Mimi, remembering the first quarrel she and Jimmie had had, and on this same point, looked somewhat doubtfully at Jimmie. But he was silently eating.
“Take one of the workmen in Ford’s factory,” Meekins was saying. “He stands or sits at a bench for eight hours a day doing one small job, tightening a bolt or inserting a plug over and over again, thousands of times a day. He knows nothing and cares less what part that bolt or that screw plays in the finished car—it’s a dulling, deadening thing which saps every bit of individualism from him. But a Chinese coolie who hasn’t one-tenth or one-hundredth the advantages of the Ford workman, is still a craftsman and not a mere tender of a dehumanizing machine.”