Does It Pay to Be Good?
By Dorothy Dix
("Dorothy Dix," a woman of the world, in the New York "Evening Journal") A YOUNG girl, seventeen years old, looking at life with the clear, candid eyes of a child, asks me this question: "Does it pay a girl to be good?" This girl is pretty and poor. She has to work for her living. Her hours of labor are long and hard, and her earnings only enough to pay for the bare necessities of existence. She has few pleasures and no luxuries, and she sees the future stretching before her, an arid highway along which she must toil foot-sore and weary, cold and hungry, and discouraged. Yet she has the natural impulses of her sex within her. She is no senseless and passionless machine. She is all quivering, throbbing girlhood. She longs for pretty clothes to set off her beauty, for amusement, for gaiety, for feasting and dancing and love-making. At her side in the shop this girl sees women, flat-chested, anemic, withered, toil-worn, who have worked from youth to age in the treadmill. They are good women, models of impeccable virtue. But their lives have been as drab and featureless as the black gowns they wear. They have never had a frill or a furbelow. They have never had a frivolous gown, or a jewel, or eaten a meal in a smart restaurant. This girl sees other women. She hears the clang of their automobiles as they roll up to the door of the shop, and she sells them embroidered silk stockings, or real lace, or swishy satin petticoats, or fifty-dollar hats. Her eyes are dazzled by the gorgeousness of their gowns, and the flash of their diamonds, and she listens enviously to their chatter about theaters, and suppers on roof-gardens, and gay parties of a kind she only reads about. She knows these are not good women, that a few years, or months, ago they were poor working girls, even as she is, and that they did not get their money by honest labor. Nevertheless, as she looks at them, and at the worn and weary women who have trodden the hard and narrow road instead of the primrose path, it is no wonder that she said: "Does it pay a girl to be good?" Yes, it does pay a girl to be good, little sister, in spite of the fact that appearances are against it. It pays in many ways. One of these is your own conscience. Believe me, there is just one person whose respect is absolutely necessary to your happiness, and that is yourself. The day you lose the ability to look yourself in the face, something has gone from you that takes all peace and comfort with it. You covet the pretty clothes these women wear; but you, who sell bargains in clothes, consider this proposition from a cold business standpoint — are a few willow plumes, a few yards of chiffon, a jewel or two, worth the price of a woman's soul? Does it pay to walk in silk attire when your silks cover a guilty heart and other women draw away their honest homespun skirts from your soiled finery? Does it pay to mortgage your future for a little present pleasure? Make no mistake about this, little sister! When you take the wrong turn of the road, it leads you away from all the natural happiness that every good woman has a right to look forward to. The kind of man you would like to marry will not be willing to marry the sort of woman that you have become. He won't want his children to have a mother who has got a past that won't bear inspection. Men seldom marry the women with whom they have gone the pace, and when they do it brings no happiness to the women. Experience has taught the men that these women are weak, and foolish, and too fond of pleasure, and are to be suspected. Nor are men just or generous to women, and the very man who has led a woman into sin will never cease to reproach her with it. If you think that wrong-doing pays, look at the faces of the women who have bought ease and luxury at a price. Watch how soon the roses fade on their cheeks and are replaced by rouge. Note how soon the light of youth flickers out in their eyes, and they have to substitute belladonna for it. Watch how thin and hard their lips grow. Listen how loud, and noisy, and mirthless their laughter becomes. Did you ever think why such women almost invariably take to drink or the use of drugs? It is to stimulate their flagging spirits, to force the laughter to their tired lips to which it no longer comes naturally, to simulate pleasure when their hearts are dead within them. Or else it is to forget, to deaden memory and remorse, to shut out from their own vision the picture of what they were, and the sorrow and shame they have brought on their families. Truly, little sister, there is nothing else in the world so little gay as what we call the gay life. It pays to be good just in health and length of life, daughter. The wages of sin is death, literally as well as figuratively, for women. It takes only seven years to send a girl from the top to the bottom of the toboggan-slide of unlawful pleasure, and the bottom is in the grave, or worse. It pays to be good because only good women get any decent treatment from men. There are no other human beings whose lives are so full of anxiety, who are so abused, insulted, and mistreated as the women who are the toys and playthings of men, and whose conduct gives men the right to treat them without reverence or respect. It pays to be good, little sister, first and last and all the time, because only the good, who have clean hands and pure hearts, have any real happiness.