“But you’re not thinking. When you think you have to dig down into things and not just look at the skin. You’re looking at the skin.” “If I be,” says Catty, “I hain’t enjoyin’ the looks of it.” “You’re all wrong. Work and clothes and manners aren’t respectability. They’re just signs of it. How do you know, in the wintertime, when a rabbit has run across a field?” “You see his tracks in the snow.” “That’s the way it is with manners and work and clothes. They’re nothing but the tracks of the rabbit of respectability. There might be respectability without any tracks at all, but then folks wouldn’t know it had been past.” “But rabbit tracks is always rabbit tracks, and clothes and manners and sich might be had by a feller that wasn’t respectable at all, but by some feller that wanted to fool folks.” “Now you’re thinking,” says Dad. “Manners and clothes aren’t respectability, as I told you. They’re just an advertisement of it. Some advertisements aren’t true, but most are. Now take a case like this. You see a stranger. He’s dirty and slouchy and he doesn’t do any work. Right off you’re prejudiced against him. He may be perfectly good and respectable, but he doesn’t look it. Take another stranger. He is well dressed. You see him working. He is polite and pleasant. Right away you get the idea that he is respectable. Now, he might be a very bad man, but he doesn’t look it. One man advertises that he isn’t respectable; the other advertises that he is. Do you see?” “Yes,” says Catty. “Now about work. Work is always respectable. A man that doesn’t work may get along and enjoy himself and be honest, but he isn’t doing anybody any good. You can’t work without doing some good for somebody else. You’re helping the world along every time you do a bit of work, no matter how small it is. You’re contributing your share to the world. Here’s your common laborer who is digging a cellar. He’s an Italian, maybe, and doesn’t get much pay, but the world can’t get along without him. Until he has dug his cellar the skilled mason or bricklayer can’t lay a brick. They’ve got to have the hole dug for their foundation, and so they’re dependent on him. The carpenter can’t drive a nail until the bricklayer has the foundation dug. The plasterer can’t plaster till the house is up; the plumber and the paperhanger and the painter are dependent on the others. See all that? Every man that works is helping some other man that works, and all of them are providing a house for somebody to live in and be comfortable.” “I see,” says Catty. “And the man that hires the others to build him a house is helping his town by increasing the amount of property in it. He helps the bank by borrowing money, maybe. He pays taxes to help run the country. He has provided labor for a lot of men—and he, in his turn has had to work somewhere to get the money to build the house. So all of it comes back to work. You can’t work a second without helping the whole world a little.”