The green bay tree

THE GREEN BAY TREE

A Novel by LOUIS BROMFIELD GROSSET & DUNLAP · PUBLISHERS · NEW YORK By arrangement with FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY Copyright, 1924, by Frederick A. Stokes Company All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America TO MY MOTHER, WHO MUST HAVE KNOWN AT SOME TIME IN HER LIFE HATTIE TOLLIVER
“ Life is hard for our children. It isn’t as simple as it was for us. Their grandfathers were pioneers and the same blood runs in their veins, only they haven’t a frontier any longer. They stand ... these children of ours ... with their backs toward this rough-hewn middle west and their faces set toward Europe and the East and they belong to neither. They are lost somewhere between. ”
“ Every one of us is different from the others. There are no two in the least alike and no one ever really knows any one else. There is always a part which remains secret and hidden, concealed in the deepest part of the soul. No husband ever knows his wife and no wife ever really knows her husband. There is always something just beyond that remains aloof and untouched, mysterious and undiscoverable, because we ourselves do not know just what it is. Sometimes it is shameful. Sometimes it is too fine, too precious, ever to reveal. It is quite beyond revelation even if we chose to reveal it. ”
“The Green Bay Tree” is part of what is in a sense a single work known as “Escape,” which includes three other parts: “Possession,” “Early Autumn,” and “A Good Woman.”

IF you can picture a little park, bright for the moment with the flush of early summer flowers and peopled with men and women in the costumes of the late nineties—If you can picture such a park set down in the midst of an inferno of fire, steel and smoke, there is no need to describe Cypress Hill on the afternoon of the garden party for the Governor. It was a large garden, indeed quite worthy of the name “park,” withdrawn and shut in by high walls of arbor vitæ clipped at intervals into small niches which sheltered bits of white statuary, some genuine, some of them copies. The Venus of Cydnos was there (in copy to be sure), and of course the Apollo Belvedere, a favorite ornament of formal gardens, as well as the Samothrace Victory dashing forward, it seemed, to soar high above the cloud of smoke from the neighboring blast furnaces.