The Squirrel-Cage

Excerpt

CHAPTER I

AN AMERICAN FAMILY

The house of the Emery family was a singularly good example of the capacity of wood and plaster and brick to acquire personality. It was the physical symbol of its owners’ position in life; it was the history of their career, written down for all to see, and as such they felt in it the most justifiable pride. When Mr. and Mrs. Emery, directly after their wedding in a small Central New York village, had gone West to Ohio they had spent their tiny capital in building a small story-and-a-half cottage, ornamented with the jig-saw work and fancy turning popular in 1872, and this had been the nucleus of their present rambling, picturesque, many-roomed home. Every step in the long series of changes which had led from its first state to its last had a profound and gratifying significance for the Emerys, and its final condition, prosperous, modern, sophisticated, with the right kind of woodwork in every room that showed, with the latest, most unobtrusively artistic effects in decoration, represented their culminating well-earned position in the inner circle of the best society of Endbury.

Moreover, they felt that just as the house had been attained with effort, self-denial and careful calculations, yet still without incurring debt, so their social position had been secured by unremitting diligence and care, but with no loss of self-respect or even of dignity. They were honestly proud both of their house and of their list of acquaintances and saw no reason to regard them as less worthy achievements of an industrious life than their four creditable grown-up children or Judge Emery’s honorable reputation at the bar. In their youth they had conceived of certain things as worth attaining. They had worked hard for these things and their unabashed pleasure in possessing them had the vivid and substantial quality which comes from a keen memory of battles with a world none too ready to grant human desires.

The two older children, George and Marietta, could remember those early struggling days with almost as fresh an emotion as that of their parents. Indeed, Marietta, now a competent, sharp-eyed matron of thirty-two, could not see the most innocuous colored lithograph without an uncontrollable wave of bitterness, so present to her mind was the period when they painfully groped their way out of chromos.

The date of that epoch coincided with the date of their first acquaintance with the Hollisters. The Hollisters were Endbury’s First Family; literally so, for they had come up from their farm in Kentucky to settle in Endbury when it was but a frontier post. It was a part of their superiority over other families that their traditions took cognizance of the time when great stumps from the primeval forest stood in what was now Endbury’s public square, the hub of interurban trolley traffic, whence the big, noisy cars started for their infinitely radiating journeys over the flat, fertile country about the little city. The particular Mrs. Hollister who, at the time the Emerys began to pierce the upper crust, was the leader of Endbury society, had discarded chromos as much as five years before....