I
It is not to be counted against Mrs. Robert Fleming Ward that at forty-five she had begun to look backward a little wistfully and forward a little disconsolately and apprehensively. She was a good woman, indeed one of the best of women, loyal, conscientious and self-sacrificing in the highest degree. But she was poignantly aware that certain ambitions dear to her heart had not been realized. Robert Fleming Ward had not attained that high place at the Sycamore County bar which had been his goal, and he seemed unable to pull himself to the level with Canby Taylor and Addison Swiggert who practiced in federal jurisdictions and were not unknown to the docket of the United States Supreme Court.
Even as Mrs. Ward was a good woman, so her husband Robert was a good man and a good lawyer. But just being good wasn’t getting the Wards anywhere. At least it wasn’t landing them within the golden portals of their early dreams. To find yourself marking time professionally and socially in a town of seventy-five thousand souls, that you’ve seen grow from twenty-five thousand, is a disagreeable experience if you are a sensitive person. And Mrs. Ward was sensitive. It grieved her to witness the prosperity flaunted by people like the Picketts, the Shepherds, the Kirbys and others comparatively new to the community, who had impudently availed themselves of Sycamore County’s clay to make brick, and of its water power to turn the wheels of industries for which the old-time Kernville pioneer stock had gloomily predicted failure.
The Picketts, the Shepherds, the Kirbys and the rest of the new element had builded themselves houses that were much more comfortable and pleasing to the eye than the houses of the children and grandchildren of the old families that had founded Kernville away back when Madison was president. The heads of the respective brick, box, match, bottle, canning, and strawboard industries might be deficient in culture but they did employ good architects. The Wards lived in a house of the Queen Anne period, which it had been necessary to mortgage to send John Marshall through college and give Helen a year at a Connecticut finishing school. The Wards’ home had deteriorated to the point of dinginess, and the dinginess, and the inability to keep a car, or to return social favors, or belong to the new country club weighed heavily upon Mrs. Ward.
Her husband, with all his industry and the fine talents she knew him to possess, was making no more money at forty-seven than he had made at thirty-five. She was a little bewildered to find that socially she had gradually lost contact with the old aristocracy without catching step with the flourishing makers of brick and other articles of commerce that were carrying the fame of Kernville into new territory. And as Mrs. Ward was possessed of a pardonable pride, this situation troubled her greatly. They had been unable to send John to the Harvard Law School, but he had made a fine record in the school of the state university, and his name now appeared beneath his father’s on the door of the law office on the second floor of the old Wheatley block, which had been pretty well deserted by tenants now that Kernville boasted a modern ten-story office building.
John Ward was a healthy, sanguine young fellow who had every intention of getting on. Some of the friends he had made in law school threw him some business, and it was remarked about the courthouse that John had more punch than his father, and was bound to succeed. Half way through the trial of a damage suit in which the firm of Ward & Ward represented a plaintiff who had been run down by an inter-urban car, the senior Ward was laid up with tonsilitis, and John carried the case through and won a verdict for twice what the plaintiff had been led to believe he could possibly get.
Helen Ward was quite as admirable and interesting as her brother. The finishing school had done her no harm and she returned to Kernville without airs, assumptions or affectations, understanding perfectly that her parents had done the best they could for her. She was nineteen, tall and straight, fair, with an abundance of brown hair and blue-gray mirthful eyes. The growing inability of her mother to maintain a maid-of-all work, now that Kernville’s eligibles for domestic service preferred the eight-hour day of the factories to house work, did not trouble Helen particularly. She could cook, wash, iron, cut out a dress and sew it together and if the furniture was wobbly and the upholstery faded she was an artist with the glue-pot and her linen covers on the chairs gave the parlor a fresh smart look. The humor that was denied their parents was Helen’s and John’s portion in large measure. They were of the Twentieth Century, spoke its language and knew all its signs and symbols. They were proud of each other, shared their pleasures and consoled each other in their disappointments, and resolutely determined to make the best of a world that wasn’t such a bad place after all.
John reached home from the office on a day early in January and found Helen preparing supper.
“Great scott, sis; has that last girl faded already!”
“Skipped, vamoosed, vanished!” Helen answered, looking up from the gas range on which she was broiling a steak. “The offer of a dollar more a week transferred her to the Kirby’s, where she’ll have nothing to do but cook. The joke’s on them. She’s the worst living cook, and not even a success in hiding her failures.”
“I hope,” said John, helping himself to a stalk of celery and biting it meditatively, “I hope the Kirbys suffer the most frightful tortures before they die of indigestion. Haven’t invited us to the party they’re giving, have they?”
“Not unless our invitations got lost in the mails. And I hear it’s going to be a snappy function with the refreshments and a jazz band imported from Chicago.”
“Look here, sis, that’s rubbing it in pretty hard! I don’t care for myself, but it’s nasty of ’em to cut you. But in a way it’s an act of reprisal. Mother didn’t ask Mrs. Kirby and Jeannette to the tea she threw for that national federation swell just before Christmas. But even at that——”
“Oh, don’t be so analytical! We’re an old family and mama refuses to see any merit in people whose grandparents didn’t settle here before the Indians left. And as we haven’t the money to train with the ancient aristocracy, we’ve got to huddle on the sidelines. Pardon me, dear, but that’s a pound of butter you’re about to sit on! You might cut a slice and place it neatly on yonder plate.”
“Snobbery!” said John, as he cut the butter with exaggerated deliberation;—“snobbery is a malady, a disease. You can’t kill it; you’ve got to feed it its own kind of pabulum. It’s as plain as daylight that we’ve got to do something to get out of the hole or we’re stuck for good.”
“We might bore for oil in the back yard,” said Helen, scrutinizing the steak. “If we struck a gusher we could break into the country club and buy a large purple limousine like the Kirbys.”
“My professional engagements don’t exhaust my brain power at present, and I’m giving considerable thought to ways and means of improving our state, condition or status as a family of exalted but unrecognized merit.”
“You’re doing nobly, John! Tom Reynolds told me they were talking of running you for prosecuting attorney. That would give you a grand boost. And there’s Alice Hovey,—I understand all about that, John. I think you’re mistaken about the Hoveys not liking you.”
“Ah, Alice!” he exclaimed mockingly. “Papa and mama Hovey have quite other ideas for Alice; no penniless barrister need apply! But I won’t deny to you that I’m pretty keen about Alice, only when I go to the house the fond parents create a low temperature that is distinctly chilly. Listen to me, Helen,” he went on with an abrupt change of tone. “You and Ned Shepherd were hitting it off grandly when something happened. He’s a fine chap and I rather got the idea that you two would make a match of it.”
“Oh no!” she protested, quickly but unconvincingly as she transferred the steak to the platter.
“His family’s trying to switch him to Sally Pickett. He hasn’t been here lately, but you do see him occasionally?”
There were tears in her eyes as she swung round from the range.
“I’ve got to stop that, John! I’m ashamed of myself for meeting him as I’ve been doing—walking with him in the back streets and letting him talk to me over the telephone when mama isn’t round. I didn’t know——”
“Well, I just happened to spot you Monday evening, and I meant to speak to you about it. Not exactly nice, sis. I’m sorry about the whole business. Ned’s really a manly chap, and I don’t believe he’ll be bullied into giving you up.”
“All over now, John,” she answered with badly-feigned indifference.
“Well, the course of true love never did run smooth. Father and mother have done their almighty best for us, but changes have come so fast in this burg they haven’t been able to keep up with the procession. Father misses chances now and then, as in refusing the Pickett case when the State went after him for polluting the river with refuse from his strawboard mill. Dad thought the prosecution was justified and foolishly volunteered to assist the State as a public duty. Pickett lost and had to spend a lot of money changing his plant; so he’s knocked us whenever he got a chance.”
“That’s just like papa. I only wish we could do something really splendid for him and mama.”
“We’re going to, sis,” said John confidently. “Take it from me we’re going to do that identical thing. Now give me the potatoes and the coffee-pot. Precede me with the bread and butter. There’s mother at the front door now. Step high as to the strains of a march of triumph. We’ll give a fine exhibition of a happy family, one for all and all for one!”