II
As Grace and her mother washed the dishes and made the beds the next morning Mrs. Durland recurred to the ill fortune that had brought Grace home from the university. Repetition was a habit with her, and she explained again and with more detail the manner in which Cummings had thrust her husband out of Cummings-Durland. She praised the spirit in which Ethel had met the situation—all this as a prelude to another plea that Grace should plan her future with care and not take the first employment that offered. One of these days the right man would come along and she would marry; Mrs. Durland hoped that both her daughters would marry good men and keep up the traditions of the American home.
“Oh, I’ve never felt that I’d marry,” Grace replied. “The reason I went to college was to fit myself to be something in the world; and now that I’ve got to begin over again I’m going to experiment a little. I may try a lot of things before I find something that suits me.”
“Well, Grace, you know I’ve done the best I could for all you children. When my time comes to go I want to know that you are all happy and well placed in life.”
“Yes, mother; you’ve been wonderful to all of us. And I want you to be sure I’m not bitter about anything. You and father have always done the best you could for us.”
It was a clear, crisp morning and Grace decided to walk the short distance to the business district. Her buoyant step expressed her lightness of spirit; never had she felt so well, never had she been so sure of herself. She was convinced that it was only her pride that had suffered in the sudden termination of her college life and that the blow was not to any lofty ideal that she had erected for herself. The thought of freedom fascinated her. Her mother’s constant lament that the world was not what it used to be and that the change was not all for the better only piqued her curiosity. While the university had thrown its protecting arm about her she had not thought of perils or dangers; they were only the subject of tedious warnings by pessimists who had despaired of youth in all ages. But now that she had been thrust into the world she refused to be appalled by hints of unseen dangers; the fact that they were only hints, intimations, vague insinuations, only increased her incredulity while creating a wonder in her mind as to their exact nature. She was afraid of nothing; dared everything.
A car screeched discordantly as it negotiated a turn on its way into the interurban station. She noted the faces of the passengers at the windows—country folk and small town people—and felt her comradeship with them. She had once heard the president of the university say that the state was like a big neighborhood of cheerful, industrious, aspiring people, and the thought pleased her.
To Grace the capital city of her native state was merely an aggregation of three hundred and some odd thousand people. The rust-colored dome of the State House and the majestic shaft of the Soldier’s and Sailor’s Monument connoted history and implied changes that were to influence and affect her as a child of the commonwealth; but she was only vaguely conscious of them. It was her fate to become an active member of the community at a time when elderly citizens, who professed to believe that nothing had changed since the last wild turkey was shot within the town’s original mile square, found themselves walking from the post office to the old Bates House site without meeting a single acquaintance. The languor that for years gave Indianapolis a half-southern air was gone. Here indeed was abundant material for the student of change.
Still a sprawling country town at the end of the Civil War, Indianapolis was booming gaily when the panic of ’73 punished it for its temerity. The few conservative capitalists who patiently sawed wood while the bubbles were bursting had money to invest when the Eastern insurance companies began foreclosing their mortgages on the best corners. Such banks as survived established new low records of refrigeration. Newcomers, stupidly desirous of initiating new enterprises, were chilled by their reception. Melancholy recollections of the panic of ’73 were long a sufficient excuse for restricted credits. Not going to take any chances! As a matter of fact they never had taken any, those cautious souls, and in the trail of the whirlwind they had gathered enough spoil to enrich themselves a thousand fold. Stinginess nobly standardized by a few merely, one might think, that the generous of hand and spirit might shine the more effulgently. The town got by the pinching times of ’84 and ’93 and continued to grow right along until the automobile craze arrived with a resulting multiplication of smokestacks. With the old guard, and such portions of a new generation as had been intimidated by its caution, sitting in pigeon-toed fear predicting calamity, the growth persisted.
Prosperity began to wear strange faces; the old-timers didn’t know the new people or pretended they didn’t. Many of these new folk who rolled over the asphalt in large expensive limousines didn’t go to church at all. A singular thing. Once it hadn’t been respectable to abstain from church. Spectacle of perfectly good citizens riding gaily to the country clubs on Sunday morning without fear of eternal damnation. Churches moving uptown, or those that clung to their old sites trying valiantly to adjust themselves to changing spiritual needs.
Sentiment—oodles and scads of sentiment about the town and its people! Visitors expected to confess that here throbs a different atmosphere—an ampler ether, a diviner air. Politics, no end. Statesmen and stateswomen everywhere visible. Families torn asunder by the battles of the primaries. A political bomb hidden under the socks in every darning basket. The fine arts not neglected. An honest interest, dating back to the founders, in bookish things; every mail box a receptacle for manuscript. Riley in Lockerbie street thrumming his lyre with the nation for audience.
No reason why any one should go friendless or stray from the straight and narrow path in a town so solidly based on the ten commandments, except that the percentage of the wayward seems bound to grow with a mounting population, particularly when the biggest war in all creation comes along and jars most disturbingly all the props of civilization. Changes! Changes of course, not local as to cause and effect, but part of the general onward sweep of the Time-Spirit impelled by gasoline to jazzy music.
In so far as she paid any attention to the talk about changes that she had heard at home and at the university, Grace believed it was all for good; that it was well to be done with hypocrisy, cant, prudishness; that a frank recognition of evil rather than an attempt to cloak it marked a distinct advance. When she was about nine her mother had rebuked her severely for using the word leg; a leg was a limb and not vulgarly to be referred to as a leg. The use of leg when leg was meant was still considered vulgar by fairly broad-minded folk in the corn-belt, probably as late as 1906—if one may attempt to fix a date for so momentous a matter.
Grace Durland was no more responsible for the changes going on about her than her parents had been for the changes of their day. They had witnessed the passing of the hoop-skirt and red flannel underwear, the abandonment of the asafetida bag as a charm against infection, and other follies innumerable. Boys and girls had once stolen down the back stairs or brazenly lied to gain an evening of freedom; now the only difference was that they demanded—and received—a key to the front door. Civilization will hardly go to smash over the question of a girl’s refusal to wear a corset or her insistence on her right to roll her stockings. The generation of Grace Durland isn’t responsible for changes that began the day after creation and started all over again after the flood and will continue right on to the end of all things.