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

she said. “Papa especially! But he and others like him wouldn’t buy a single share when poor Dan went begging and peddling all over town; and now I’m glad they didn’t. It’s so much better for him to have done it alone.”

“But, my dear,” Harlan insisted, not altogether without exasperation, “he hasn’t done it.”

“My dear,” she returned promptly; “he’s going to!”

“But, Martha⁠—”

“Listen,” she said. “I’ll tell you something that you don’t understand, because you’ve been living here all along. When I went off to college, I spent the Christmas holidays visiting some Eastern girls, and papa didn’t see me for a whole year. Then he nearly fainted⁠—I’d grown so! Yet I’d grown just as much the year before, but he never noticed it because I was living at home where he saw me every day. It’s the same way with a city like this, Harlan. I haven’t been here for so long that I can see the change. Everything is going to happen that Dan prophesied.”

She had spoken with gravity, but Harlan laughed, not impressed. “Yes, the boosters brag of the increase in population shown by the last census,” he said. “We’ve got a few thousand more Italians and Polish Jews and negroes, I suppose; and some new ugly factories and dwelling-houses of objectionable architecture. They’re beginning to build awful little shacks they call ‘bungalows,’ hurrying them up by the dozen. Is that the glorious cosmopolis of your hero’s prophecies, Martha? To my mind it’s only an extension of hideousness, and down where I live, in my grandmother’s old house, it’s getting so smoky in winter that the air is noxious⁠—the whole town’s dirty, for that matter.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yesterday, as soon as I got here, I noticed that even in summer the air’s smokier than it used to be. I think the city was a cleaner place and a better-looking place when I went away. There’s the smoke, of course, and I’ve already seen how they’re beginning to tear old buildings down and put up bigger ones, and no building has any thought of having the slightest relation to the ones on each side of it. In a way, as you say, it’s getting hideous, though some of these long, wide streets are pleasant, even to a person who’s stayed in Europe too long perhaps⁠—and National Avenue is really beautiful. I don’t know where except in towns like this you’ll find a long street of such big, solid, comfortable houses with green trees and clean lawns about them. This part of the town, at least, hasn’t changed; but a change has begun, and I believe it’s the growth⁠—I think it’s the incredible growth that Dan predicted, Harlan. I think it’s begun.”

Again she had spoken gravely, though with a glinting look at him which had in it some hint of triumph, and piqued him.

“Well, if this fabulous growth has begun,” he said incautiously, “you’re surely not hero-worshipper enough to think it’s going to extend as far as Ornaby Addition, are you?”

She had hoped for this, had led him into it. “Papa’s going to begin building an extension of the Tennessee Avenue car line next month,” she said. “I forced him to admit how far out it would run.”

“Not so far as the Addition?”

“Within an eighth of a mile of it,” said Martha. “That’s what made him so noisy!”

XX

Harlan was astonished, but he took his little defeat well; and Martha in turn encountered a surprise, for he showed a discomfited kind of pleasure. “So Ornaby Addition’s going to get its rapid transit at last,” he said. “That’s not so bad, you know. Why, Dan might come out pretty well on the thing after all!”

“But doesn’t that annoy you, Harlan?” she asked.

“You mean that I want to see my brother beaten? That I really haven’t good will toward him?”

“No, indeed I don’t. I mean: Wouldn’t it annoy you to find you’d always been mistaken about him?”

“But I’m not. I grew up in the same house with him, and I ought to know him. If he does happen to do anything with his wild old idea after all, it’ll be by the grace of a series of miracles no one could possibly have foreseen.”

“That is to say,” Martha observed, “you’d call him ‘a fool for luck.’ ”

“Let’s put it, I hope he is.”

“And you were just telling me I didn’t change!” she cried.

“Yes,” he returned placidly;⁠—“it seems we’re neither of us wiser than we used to be. We sit here talking of Dan and his Addition just as we’d have been talking about them if you’d never been away. You really ought to be speaking with a slight foreign accent and unable to put your mind on anything later than the seventeenth century.”

She nodded, agreeing. “Yes, it’s queer; and it makes me feel a little queer. You go away and stay forever and ever; then you come back home and by the time your trunk’s unpacked you’re ready to wonder if you’ve been away at all;⁠—maybe you’ve just had a long dream. Of course, too, I knew what was going on at home⁠—not through papa!⁠—but some of the girls of our old set here have been faithful about writing, in spite of their every single one of ’em getting married. That makes me feel I belong to the seventeenth century⁠—almost ‘cinquecento!’ ”

“I’d prefer the ‘cinquecento,’ ” Harlan said, and immediately added: “Not that I care for it myself.”

“What!” she cried, her eyes widening. “You’d even criticize the Renaissance?”

It appeared that he would, and willingly. Offhand he called the Renaissance “a naive movement amusingly overrated and with the single merit that it was better than what had gone before.” Martha was indignant, and they had an argument in which she proved to be no match for him. He had not been abroad since his junior vacation as an undergraduate, but he knew a great deal more about Italy than she did, though she had just come from long residence there. She