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.
III
The last of a number of errands she had undertaken for her mother brought Grace to Shipley’s a little before twelve. She observed the young women who waited on her with a particular attention inspired by the feeling that she too might soon be standing behind a counter. Some of the clerks at Shipley’s were women well advanced in middle life, whom she remembered from her earliest visits to the establishment. These veterans contributed to Shipley’s reputation for solidity and permanence. They enjoyed the friendly acquaintance of many customers, who relied upon their counsel in their purchases. There were many more employees of this type in Shipley’s than in any other establishment in town; they were an asset, a testimony to the consideration shown the employees, the high character of the owners. Grace’s imagination played upon her own future: what if she should find herself in ten or twenty years behind a counter, ambition and hope dead in her and nothing ahead but the daily exhibition of commodities and the making out of sale slips!
But this cloud was only the tiniest speck on her horizon. She had already set a limit upon the time she would spend in such a place if her services were accepted; it was the experience she wanted, and when she had exhausted the possibilities of Shipley’s or some similar place she meant to carry her pitcher of curiosity to other fountains.
While waiting for Irene outside the lunch room she found amusement in watching the shoppers, studying them, determining their financial and social status. Some one had told her that she was endowed with special gifts for appraising character, and she had the conceit of her inexperience as a student of the human kind. Her speculations as to the passers-by were interrupted by the arrival of Irene.
“It’s perfectly wonderful to see you again! I was that delighted to hear your voice over the wire last night. You’re looking marvelous! I always adored your gypsy effect! Come along—there’s a particular table in a far corner they keep for me and we can buzz for just one hour.”