Professional Middle-class Couple, 1927

What justifies the inequality

That issues her a tastefully square-cut

Ruby for her finger, him a suit

Whose rumpled, unemphatic dignity

Declares a life of working sitting down,

While someone in a sweatshop has to squint

And palsy sewing, and a continent

Sheds blood to pry the gemstone from the ground,

Could not be justice. Nothing but the use

To which they put prosperity can speak

In their defense: the faces money makes,

They demonstrate, don’t have to be obtuse,

Entitled, vapid, arrogantly strong;

Only among the burghers do you find

A glance so frank, engaging, and refined,

So tentative, so conscious of  its wrong.