National Avenue by Booth Tarkington (book recommendations website .txt) 📕

As Martha chattered she had opened one of the double front doors, which were unlocked, and now she preceded him into the large central hall, floored with black and white squares of marble. A fine staircase, noble in proportions and inevitably of black walnut, followed a curving upward sweep against curved walls to the third story; while upon both sides of the hall, broad and lofty doorways, with massive double doors standing open, invited the caller to apartments heavily formal in brown velvet and damasks of gold.

In obedience to a casual wave of Martha’s hand, as she disappeared through a doorway at the other end of the hall, Harlan left his overcoat and hat upon a baroque gold console-table and entered the drawing-room to his left. Here a fire of soft coal sought to enliven a ponderous black-marble mantelpiece, and Harlan, warming his hands, gazed disapprovingly at the painting hung upon the heavy paper of the wall above. This painting was not without celebrity, but after looking at it seriously for several minutes Harlan shook his head at it, and was caught in the act by Martha, who came in with a light step behind him.

“Don’t scold the poor thing, Harlan!” she said; and, as he turned, a little startled, he took note again of a fact he had many times remarked before: she moved with a noiseless rapidity unusual in so large a person. Moreover, her quickness was twice in evidence now; for she had changed her dark cloth dress for a gown of gray silk; and as final testimony to her celerity, when she sat in a chair by the fire and crossed her knees, a silken instep of gray was revealed between the silver buckle of her slipper and the hem of the long skirt she wore in the mode of that time.

“You’re like lightning, Martha,” Harlan said;⁠—“but not like thunder. I didn’t even hear you come into the room. What is it you don’t want me to scold?”

“Poor papa’s Corot.”

“I wasn’t scolding it. I was only thinking: What’s the use of having a Corot if you hang it so high and so much against the dazzle of the firelight that nobody can see it.”

“Oh, that doesn’t matter to papa,” Martha said cheerfully. “Papa doesn’t care to see it; and he doesn’t care whether anyone else sees it or not. He bought it the summer the doctor made him go abroad, after mamma died. Somebody in Paris convinced him he ought to own an important picture. They took him first to see a Bougereau and he got very indignant. So they apologized and hurried out this Corot and told him who Corot was; so he bought it. All he cares about is that he owns it; he doesn’t think about it as a thing to look at any more than the bonds in his safety-deposit boxes. He knows they’re there, and they’re worth just so much, and they’re his; and that’s all he cares about. You know papa runs the house to suit himself.”

“No,” Harlan returned skeptically. “I can’t say I quite know that.”

“You don’t?” She laughed and went on: “Well, he does; especially when he gets set in his head. A few of papa’s notions are just molasses, but most of ’em are like plaster of Paris;⁠—if you don’t change ’em in a hurry before they set you never can change ’em! That’s the trouble just now; he’s turned into plaster of Paris about poor Dan’s land operations, confound him!”

She uttered this denunciation with a sharpness of emphasis not ill-natured, but earnest enough to make Harlan look at her seriously across the small table just set between them by a coloured housemaid.

“You’ve been trying to alter your father’s opinion of Dan’s commercial ability, have you?” he inquired.

“Yes, I have,” she answered crisply. “What’s the matter with the business men of this town, anyway? Why won’t they help Dan do a big thing?”

At this Harlan allowed his eyes to fall from the troubled and yet spirited inquiry of her direct gaze; he looked at the cup he accepted from her, and frowned slightly as he answered: “Of course they think he’s a visionary. The most enthusiastic home boomer in the lot doesn’t dream the town’ll ever reach out as far as Dan’s foolish ‘Addition.’ ”

“How do you know it’s foolish?”

“Why, because the population would have to double to reach even the edge of his land, and this town hasn’t the kind of impetus that develops suburbs. You know what sort of place it is, yourself, Martha. It’s only an overgrown market-town, and an overgrown market-town is what it’ll always be.”

“Don’t you like it?” she asked challengingly. “Don’t you even like the town you were born in and grew up in?”

“That sounds like Dan. His latest phase is to become oratorical about the enormous future of our own, our native city⁠—since he bought the Ornaby farm! I suppose I like it as well as I like any city except Florence. I don’t think it’s as ugly as New York, for instance, because the long stretches of big shade trees palliate our streets half the year, and nothing palliates the unevenness and everlasting tearing down and building up and digging and blasting and steam-riveting of New York. But I do hate the crudeness of things here.”

“That’s the old, old cheap word for us,” she said, “ ‘Crude!’ ”

Harlan laughed. “You have been listening to Dan, the civic patriot! Crudeness isn’t our specialty; the whole country’s crude, Martha.”

“Compared to what? China?”

“You’ll be telling me all about our literary societies and women’s clubs and the factories, if I don’t take care,” he returned lightly. “How dreadful all that is!” He sighed, and continued: “I suppose you’ve been trying to convince your father he ought to extend one of his streetcar lines out into the wilderness toward Dan’s ‘Addition.’ Is that what you’ve been up to with the old gentleman, Martha?”

“Yes, it is,” she