The Open Question: A Tale of Two Temperaments

Transcriber's Note: A Table of Contents has been added.
AUTHOR OF GEORGE MANDEVILLE'S HUSBAND
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON 1899
Copyright, 1898, by Harper & Brothers. All rights reserved.
THE OPEN QUESTION

THE OPEN QUESTION
It is not always easy to trace the origin of an American family, even when the immediate progenitor did not begin life as a boot-black or a prospector, without so much as a grub stake. The Ganos had been people of some education and some means—clergymen, merchants going to and from the West Indies, or home-keeping planters in the South—for the little space of a hundred years before the Civil War. Further back than that—darkness.
Whether the name was of Huguenot, Flemish, Italian, or other origin, the Ganos themselves, like thousands of families of consequence in America, never pretended to know. Only one of the race ever evinced the least disposition to care.
In the family mind, to be born a Gano was of itself so shining an achievement as almost to constitute an unfair advantage over the rest of mankind. The name (which was rigidly accented on the final syllable) was held to confer a distinction peculiar and sufficient, difficult as it may be for the inhabitants of a larger world to realize on what the illusion lived. The Ganos had never been enormously rich; they had never done anything of national or even of municipal importance, unless founding a religious paper and endowing a theological seminary to spread a faith which they themselves speedily abandoned—unless these modest achievements might be construed as taking some sort of interest in public concerns. They held themselves aloof from politics, and religiously minded their own affairs. The oddest thing, perhaps, about their naïve veneration for the house of Gano was that so many of their neighbors shared it. Generation after generation, it imposed itself upon the community they lived in. To be able to say of a vexed question, Gano agrees with me, was to turn the scale at once in the speaker's favor. A stranger would be told, Smith married a Gano, you see, as though that single phrase established Smith's claims on your consideration.