CHAPTER I
Captain Lew Golden would have saved any foreign observer a great deal of
trouble in studying America. He was an almost perfect type of the petty
small-town middle-class lawyer. He lived in Panama, Pennsylvania. He had
never been "captain" of anything except the Crescent Volunteer Fire
Company, but he owned the title because he collected rents, wrote
insurance, and meddled with lawsuits.
He carried a quite visible mustache-comb and wore a collar, but no tie.
On warm days he appeared on the street in his shirt-sleeves, and
discussed the comparative temperatures of the past thirty years with
Doctor Smith and the Mansion House 'bus-driver. He never used the word
"beauty" except in reference to a setter dog--beauty of words or music,
of faith or rebellion, did not exist for him. He rather fancied large,
ambitious, banal, red-and-gold sunsets, but he merely glanced at them as
he straggled home, and remarked that they were "nice." He believed that
all Parisians, artists, millionaires, and socialists were immoral. His
entire system of theology was comprised in the Bible, which he never
read, and the Methodist Church, which he rarely attended; and he desired
no system of economics beyond the current platform of the Republican
party. He was aimlessly industrious, crotchety but kind, and almost
quixotically honest.
He believed that "Panama, Pennsylvania, was good enough for anybody."
This last opinion was not shared by his wife, nor by his daughter Una.
Mrs. Golden was one of the women who aspire just enough to be vaguely
discontented; not enough to make them toil at the acquisition of
understanding and knowledge. She had floated into a comfortable
semi-belief in a semi-Christian Science, and she read novels with a
conviction that she would have been a romantic person "if she hadn't
married Mr. Golden--not but what he's a fine man and very bright and
all, but he hasn't got much imagination or any, well, _romance_!"
She wrote poetry about spring and neighborhood births, and Captain
Golden admired it so actively that he read it aloud to callers. She
attended all the meetings of the Panama Study Club, and desired to learn
French, though she never went beyond borrowing a French grammar from the
Episcopalian rector and learning one conjugation. But in the pioneer
suffrage movement she took no part--she didn't "think it was quite
ladylike." ... She was a poor cook, and her house always smelled stuffy,
but she liked to have flowers about. She was pretty of face, frail of
body, genuinely gracious of manner. She really did like people, liked to
give cookies to the neighborhood boys, and--if you weren't impatient
with her slackness--you found her a wistful and touching figure in her
slight youthfulness and in the ambition to be a romantic personage, a
Marie Antoinette or a Mrs. Grover Cleveland, which ambition she still
retained at fifty-five.
She was, in appearance, the ideal wife and mother--sympathetic,
forgiving, bright-lipped as a May morning. She never demanded; she
merely suggested her desires, and, if they were refused, let her lips
droop in a manner which only a brute could withstand.
She plaintively admired her efficient daughter Una.
Una Golden was a "good little woman"--not pretty, not noisy, not
particularly articulate, but instinctively on the inside of things;
naturally able to size up people and affairs. She had common sense and
unkindled passion. She was a matter-of-fact idealist, with a healthy
woman's simple longing for love and life. At twenty-four Una had half a
dozen times fancied herself in love. She had been embraced at a dance,
and felt the stirring of a desire for surrender. But always a native
shrewdness had kept her from agonizing over these affairs.
She was not--and will not be--a misunderstood genius, an undeveloped
artist, an embryonic leader in feminism, nor an ugly duckling who would
put on a Georgette hat and captivate the theatrical world. She was an
untrained, ambitious, thoroughly commonplace, small-town girl. But she
was a natural executive and she secretly controlled the Golden
household; kept Captain Golden from eating with his knife, and her
mother from becoming drugged with too much reading of poppy-flavored
novels.
She wanted to learn, learn anything. But the Goldens were too
respectable to permit her to have a job, and too poor to permit her to
go to college. From the age of seventeen, when she had graduated from
the high school--in white ribbons and heavy new boots and tight new
organdy--to twenty-three, she had kept house and gone to gossip-parties
and unmethodically read books from the town library--Walter Scott,
Richard Le Gallienne,
