My wife contrived that we should fall in behind the young people as we went, and she asked, “What do you suppose she made of it all?”
“Probably she thought it was the house of Sancho Panza.”
“No; she hasn’t read enough to be so ignorant even as that. It’s astonishing how much she doesn’t know. What can her home life have been like?”
“Philistine to the last degree. We people who are near to literature have no conception how far from it most people are. The immense majority of ‘homes,’ as the newspapers call them, have no books in them except the Bible and a semi-religious volume or two—things you never see out of such ‘homes’—and the State business directory. I was astonished when it came out that she knew about Every Other Week. It must have been by accident. The sordidness of her home life must be something unimaginable. The daughter of a village capitalist, who’s put together his money dollar by dollar, as they do in such places, from the necessities and follies of his neighbours, and has half the farmers of the region by the throat through his mortgages—I don’t think that she’s ‘one to be desired’ any more than ‘the daughter of a hundred earls,’ if so much.”
“She doesn’t seem sordid herself.”
“Oh, the taint doesn’t show itself at once—
‘If nature put not forth her power
About the opening of the flower,
Who is it that would live an hour?’
and she is a flower, beautiful, exquisite.”
“Yes, and she had a mother as well as this father of hers. Why shouldn’t she be like her mother?”
I laughed. “That is true! I wonder why we always leave the mother out of the count when we sum up the hereditary tendencies? I suppose the mother is as much a parent as the father.”