CHAPTER XII
The New England town of Willowfield was a place of great importance. Its importance—religious, intellectual, and social—was its strong point. It took the liberty of asserting this with unflinching dignity. Other towns might endeavour to struggle to the front, and, indeed, did so endeavour, but Willowfield calmly held its place and remained unmoved. Its place always had been at the front from the first, and there it took its stand. It had, perhaps, been hinted that its sole title to this position lay in its own stately assumption: but this, it may be argued, was sheer envy and entirely unworthy of notice.
“Willowfield is not very large or very rich,” its leading old lady said, “but it is important and has always been considered so.”
There was society in Willowfield, society which had taken up its abiding-place in three or four streets and confined itself to developing its importance in half a dozen families—old families. They were always spoken of as the “old families,” and, to be a member of one of them, even a second or third cousin of weak mind and feeble understanding, was to be enclosed within the magic circle outside of which was darkness, wailing, and gnashing of teeth. There were the Stornaways, who had owned the button factory for nearly a generation and a half—which was a long time; the Downings, who had kept the feed-store for quite thirty years, and the Burtons, who had been doctors for almost as long, not to mention the Larkins, who had actually founded the Willowfield Times, and kept it going, which had scarcely been expected of them at the outset.
Their moral, mental, and social gifts notwithstanding, there was nothing connected with the Stornaways, the Downings, the Burtons, and the Larkins of such importance as their antiquity. The uninformed outsider, on hearing it descanted upon, might naturally have been betrayed into the momentary weakness of expecting to see Mr. Downing moulder away, and little old Doctor Burton crumble into dust.
“They belong,” it was said, with the temperateness of true dignity, “to our old families, and that is something, you know, even in America.”
“It has struck me,” an observing male visitor once remarked, “that there are a good many women in Willowfield, and that altogether it has a feminine tone.”
It was certainly true that among the Stornaways, the Downings, the Burtons, and the Larkins, the prevailing tone was feminine; and as the Stornaways, the Downings, the Burtons, and the Larkins comprised Willowfield society, and without its society Willowfield lost its significance, the observing male visitor may not have been far wrong. If mistakes were made in Willowfield society, they were always made by the masculine members of it. It was Mr. Stornaway who had at one time been betrayed into the blunder of inviting to a dinner-party at his house a rather clever young book-keeper in his employ, and it was Doctor Burton who had wandered still more glaringly from the path of rectitude by taking a weak, if amiable, interest in a little music teacher with a sweet, tender voice, even going so far as to request his family to call upon her and ask her to take tea with them. It was Mr. Downing, who, when this last incident occurred and created some sensation, had had the temerity to intimate that he thought the Doctor was entirely in the right; though, to be sure, he had afterwards been led to falter in this opinion and subside into craven silence, being a little gentleman of timorous and yielding nature, and rather overborne by a large and powerful feminine majority in his own household. Mr. Larkin was, it is to be regretted, the worst of the recreant party, being younger and more unmanageable, having not only introduced to public notice certain insignificant though somewhat talented persons in the shape of young men and women who talked well, or sang well, or wielded lively pens, but had gone to the length of standing by them unflinchingly, demanding civility for them at the hands of his own family of women in such a manner as struck a deadly blow at the very foundations of the social structure. But Mr. Larkin—he was known as Jack Larkin to an astonishing number of people—was a bold man by nature and given to deeds of daring, from the fatal consequences of which nothing but the fact that he was a member of one of the “old families” could have saved him. As he was a part—and quite a large part—of one of these venerable households, and, moreover, knew not the fear of man—or woman—his failings could be referred to as “eccentricities.”