CHAPTER I
A crisis in the financial world of California kept the men who were employed in the Palmas Valley Bank of Valdivia hard at work for several hours after statutory closing time.
Nathaniel Mar never came home in these days without bringing a black leather bag full of papers, to work over in the dining-room.
He had his big desk in there because Mrs. Mar thought it out of place in the parlor, though the parlor was the quietest room in the house and the least used, whereas the dining-room was the most frequented quarter of the modest establishment, and the very place where both the big desk, and the big man who sat before it, were most in the way.
For here the family not only ate their meals, but here, in Mrs. Mar’s rocking-chair, the screams of the infant daughter were drowned in milk or overcome by sleep; here the two small boys were taught letters and manners; here, on their mother’s work-table, was reared the ever-renewed mountain of “mending,” and these the walls that oftener than any others looked down upon the mistress’s struggles with the “single-handed help”—a succession of Irish or Scandinavian girls who came, saw, conquered some of the china, and departed.
This concentration of family life in the dining-room was not peculiar to the Mars. Valdivia—all California, indeed all the towns of all the northern and western states, were full of houses where the shut-up parlors bore dumb witness to a social habit that was become mere tradition.
The forebears of these people, especially those German, French, or Spanish, had need of a room where they might receive their friends and talk to them at their ease. But in their descendants this much chastened need had taken on the air of an indulgence, and was shrinking out of sight.