Prewrite

"And there can be no question of money between me and Tom Outland. I can't explain just how I feel about it, but it would somehow damage my recollections of him, would make that episode in my life commonplace like everything else."

"Godfrey," his wife had gravely said one day, when she detected an ironical turn in some remark he made about the new house, "is there something you would rather have done with that money than to have built a house with it?"
"Nothing, my dear, nothing. If with that cheque I could have brought back the fun I had writing my history, you'd never have got your house. But one couldn't get that for twenty thousand dollars. The great pleasures don't come so cheap. There is nothing else, thank you."

The Professor's House seems to say a lot of things about money and how exposure to money changes the people who come into contact with it. Cather says a lot about how money ruins people and relationships. Rosamond is ruined by the money that she inherits from Tom's patent, and this money also ruins her relationship with her sister. It also distorts her memory of Tom to some degree. She creates Outland “as a memorial” to him, but she seems to forget all about the mesa and the Southwest and Tom's humble nature. The money has made her relationship with Tom ordinary. Her father refuses to take some of her money for this very reason. Money is a pure matter of utility for Cather, so any relationship that is defined in the parameters of money becomes a commonplace, but useful, thing. Using the money from Tom's will defines Rosamond's relationship with Tom as one that is based on money, and so reduces him to a source of funds. I think that this idea of money as a utility that cheapens whatever it comes into contact with is the idea that Cather is trying to leave us with. At the end of the novel, when the professor resigns himself to a life without happiness, what he is really resigning himself to is a life on his wife's terms, a life saturated with money. All of the real and pleasurable things that are presented in the book are immaterial things, not dependent on extravagant wealth, like the mesa and the laughter of the little girls, the study, the view of Lake Michigan. The professor is holding onto these things, rather literally, for dear life. Sometimes, though, appreciation of these pleasures is tainted by or only attainable through money. The hotel that overlooks the lake costs more, the little girls must be clad in party dresses, the mesa needs money to be excavated.