I
Caleb Gridley, the girl’s father, ran the tannery in the larger town of Paris, twenty miles west of the Foxboros. He was a big-bodied, small headed man, with iron fists, a paving-block jaw and legs like telephone poles. Some of his words weigh seven to the pound and he did not secure them from his Bible, either, if he ever read his Bible.
Mrs. Clementina Gridley, the girl’s mother, claimed she was related on her mother’s side to a duchess. Then to double rivet the exclusive ancestry, on her father’s side she had vague claims to a relative who had crossed on a certain well-known occasion to this stern and rock-bound coast, landing at Plymouth and marking the commencement of the antique furniture business. Mrs. Gridley was short and in upper contour resembled a barrel. She clothed herself and little daughter in purple and fine linen, and both of them toiled not, neither did they spin. She brought the first lorgnette to Paris, hung its first pair of sunfast overdrapes, called old Bill Chew, the colored man-of-all-work, the “coachman”, affected to be shocked when old Caleb blew his tea in a saucer and tried unsuccessfully to start a local aristocracy.
These two—a mother with an ingrowing consciousness of her own grandeur and a father who endured it because he was too engrossed in making money to give his family much attention—were the little Gridley girl’s mental, moral and spiritual handicaps. More than one good woman’s fingers itched to paddle her; more than one good man would have counted it a special dispensation from Providence if he could have spent five minutes alone with her and thoroughly boxed her ears. But Bernie’s extremities were never paddled and Bernie’s ears were never boxed.
At four, little Bernice was told she was made of better clay than the ordinary run of Eve’s daughters and at six she was sure of it. At eight she frequently mentioned the family “blood.” At ten she had queried Mrs. Joseph Fodder if “common children were not terribly coarse and mortifying” and “why did the Creator ever make the lower classes so disgustingly prolific?”
Yet the little snob was pretty, pretty as a Dresden doll. And the Duchess kept her starched and ironed and curled and furbelowed until the tired mothers of the disgustingly prolific lower classes gave up all competition in despair.
For the opposite and lower end of the social seesaw the Forges as a family would have answered as well as any caste exhibit to the county. Living in Foxboro Center was enough. Could any social good come out of Foxboro Center? Certainly not! Mute, inglorious Miltons might infest the place, but the Gridleys—at least, the female Gridleys—aspired to nothing in common with mute, inglorious Miltons.