Broken to the Plow | Page 8

heat. Trees and hedges and climbing honeysuckle had
contributed, no doubt, to the defense of these relics of a more genial
day, but the dogged determination of their owners to save their old
homes at any cost must have been the determining factor, Starratt had
often thought, as he lingered before the old picket fences, in an attempt
to revive his memories of other days. He could not remember, of course,
quite back to the time when the Hyde Street hill had been in an opulent
heyday, but the flavor of its quality had trickled through to his
generation. This was the section where his mother had languished in
the prim gloom of her lamp-shaded parlor before his father's discreet
advances. The house was gone ... replaced by a bay-windowed,
jig-sawed horror of the '80s, but the garden still smiled, its quaint
fragrance reënforced at the proper season by the belated blossoms of a
homesick and wind-bitten magnolia. He was sure, judged by
present-day standards, that his mother's old home must have been a
very modest, genial sort of place ... without doubt a clapboard,
two-storied affair with a single wide gable and a porch running the full
length of the front. But, in a day when young and pretty women were at
a premium, one did not have to live in a mansion to attract desirable
suitors, and Fred Starratt had often heard his mother remind his father
without bitterness of the catches that had been thrown her way. Not that
Starratt, senior, had been a bad prospect matrimonially. Quite the
contrary. He had come from Boston in the early '70s, of good
substantial family, and with fair looks and a capacity for getting on.
Likewise, a chance for inside tips on the stock market, since he had
elected to go in with a brokerage firm. And so they were married, with
all of conservative San Francisco at the First Unitarian Church to see
the wedding, leavened by a sprinkling of the very rich and a dash of the
ultrafashionable. Unfortunately, the inside tips didn't pan out ... absurd
and dazzling fortune was succeeded by appalling and irretrievable
failure. Starratt, senior, was too young a man to succumb to the scurvy
trick of fate, but he never quite recovered. Gradually the Starratt family
fell back a pace. To the last there were certain of the old guard who still
remembered them with bits of coveted pasteboard for receptions or

marriages or anniversary celebrations ... but the Starratts became more
and more a memory revived by sentiment and less and less a vital
reality.
Fred Starratt used to speculate, during his nocturnal wandering among
the shadows of his parents' youthful haunts, just what his position
would have been had these stock-market tips proved gilt edged. He
tried to imagine himself the master of a splendid estate down the
peninsula--preferably at Hillsboro--possessed of high-power cars and a
string of polo ponies ... perhaps even a steam yacht... But these
dazzling visions were not always in the ascendant. There were times
when a philanthropic dream moved him more completely and he had
naïve and varied speculations concerning the help that he could have
placed in the way of the less fortunate had he been possessed of
unlimited means. Or, again, his hypothetical wealth put him in the way
of the education that placed him easily at the top of a stirring
profession.
"If I'd only had half a chance!" would escape him.
This was a phrase borrowed unconsciously from his mother. She was
never bitter nor resentful at their profitless tilt with fortune except as it
had reacted on her son.
"You should have gone to college," she used to insist, regretfully,
summing up by implication his lack of advancement. At first he took a
measure of comfort in her excuse; later he came to be irritated by it.
And in moments of truant self-candor he admitted he could have made
the grade with concessions to pride. There were plenty of youths who
worked their way through. But he always had moved close to the edge
of affluent circles, where he had caught the cold but disturbing glow of
their standards. He left high school with pallid ideals of gentility, ideals
that expressed themselves in his reasons for deciding to enter an
insurance office. Insurance, he argued, was a nice business, one met
nice people, one had nice hours, one was placed in nice surroundings.
He had discovered later that one drew a nice salary, too. Well, at least,
he had had the virtue of choosing without a very keen eye for the
financial returns.

Ten years of being married to a woman who demanded a nice home
and nice clothes and a circle of nice friends had done a great deal
toward making