Nowhere does nature do a kindlier summer work than in Stoughton. In winter the trees and gardens and lawns, worse than naked with their rustling or crumbling reminders of past glory, expose the prim rows of prim houses and the stiff and dull life that dozes behind their walls. In winter no one could be deceived as to what living in Stoughton meant—living in it in the sense of being forced there from a city, forced to remain permanently.
But in summer, nature charitably lends Stoughton a corner of the gorgeous garment with which she adorns its country. The sun dries the muddy streets and walks, and the town slumbers in comfort under huge trees, whose leaves quiver with what seems to be the gentle joy of a quiet life. The boughs and the creepers conspire to transform hideous little houses into crystallised songs of comfort and content. The lawns lie soft and green and restful. The gardens dance in the homely beauty of lilac and hollyhock and wild rose. Those who then come from the city to Stoughton sigh at the contrast of this poetry with the harsh prose of city life. They wonder at the sombre faces of the old inhabitants, at the dumb and stolid expression of youth, at the fierce discontent which smoulders in the eyes of a few.
But if they stay they do not wonder long. For the town in the bare winter is the real town the year round. The town of summer, tricked out in nature’s borrowed finery, is no more changed than was the jackdaw by his stolen peacock plumes. The smile, the gaiety, is on the surface. The prim, solemn old heart of Stoughton is as unmoved as when the frost is biting it.
In the first days of November Emily Bromfield, walking through the wretched streets under bare black boughs and a gray sky, had the full bitterness of her castaway life forced upon her. She felt as if she were suffocating.
She had been used to the gayest and freest society in America. Here, to talk as she had been used to talking and to hearing others talk, would have produced scandal or stupefaction. To act as she and her friends acted in Washington, would have set the preachers to preaching against her. There was no one with whom she could get into touch. She had instantly seen that the young men were not worth her while. The young women, she felt, would meet her advances only in the hope of getting the materials for envious gossip about her.
“It will be years,” she said to herself, “before I shall be able to narrow and slacken myself to fit this place. And why should I? Of what use would life be?”
She soon felt how deeply Stoughton disapproved of her, chiefly, as she thought, because she did not conceal her resentment against its prying and peeping inquiry and its narrow judgments. She was convinced that but for her bicycle and her books she would go mad. Her ever-present idea, conscious or sub-conscious, was, “How get away from Stoughton?” A hundred times a day she repeated to herself, or aloud in the loneliness of her room, “How? how? how?” sometimes in a frenzy; again, stupidly, as if “how” were a word of a complex and difficult meaning which she could not grasp.
But there was never any answer.
She had formerly wished at times that she were a man. Now, she wished it hourly. That seemed the only solution of the problem of her life—that, or marriage. And she felt she might as hopefully wish the one as the other.
Year by year, with a patience as slow and persevering as that of a colony of coral insects, Stoughton developed a small number of youth of both sexes. Year by year the railroads robbed her of her best young men, leaving behind only such as were stupid or sluggard. Year by year the young women found themselves a twelvemonth nearer the fate of the leaves which the frost fails to cut off and disintegrate. For a few there was the alternative of marrying the blighted young men—a desperate adventure in the exchange of single for double or multiple burdens.