the more time wasted on it, the prettier it is

Veblen provokes the idea that women during his time (and he most likely would have assumed during today's era as well) were designated to the "conspicuous leisure" that shackled women to the domestic role of mother and wife.

He argues that the leisures of the wife/mother apart from her typical household duties include, but are not limited to, decorating for the holidays, and are primarily for the appeal of anyone other than herself. Veblen describes the domestic female's appearance (based on socially-imposed standards, of course) are more specifically directed towards her husband's tastes. 

Veblen goes on to talk about what women do and don't do for the sake of their husbands and of society, however I was intrigued by was his assertion that the standards of beauty for which women base their homes and appearances and such on were only viewed as beauteous because they were considered to be conspicuously wasteful. In other words (or rather how I translated it), consumer-based standards of beauty that women typically spend much time doting over are merely objectified as attractive because we understand that the woman spent (or rather wasted) much of her time attending to such artifacts in order to please her audience. 

This is what Edna longed to escape. The duty of constantly attending to her children and husband and household while simultaneously worrying what a shallow community of conformists thought about her appearance as a mother, wife, and overall woman exhausted Edna. She was able to recognize the manifest illogic of such a lifestyle. 

While Edna's suicide can be argued as either a tragedy to represent her failures or as her triumph to break the convention of Victorian womanhood (or both I guess), it is undeniable that her attempts to liberate herself from the bindings of gender-based conformity are at least admirable given the context of her environment.