The Bent Twig | Page 7

simplest clothes made them indistinguishable from their
fellows. Sylvia and Judith also enjoyed the unfair advantage of being
quite unusually pretty little girls (Judith being nothing less than a
beauty), so that even on the few occasions when they were invited to a
children's party in the faculty circle their burnished, abundant hair,
bright eyes, and fresh, alert faces made up for the plainness of their
white dresses and thick shoes.
It was, moreover, not only in externals like clothes that the childhood
of Sylvia and Judith and Lawrence differed from that of the other
faculty children. Their lives were untouched by the ominous black
cloud familiar to academic households, the fear for the future, the fear
which comes of living from hand to mouth, the dread of "being obliged
to hand in one's resignation," a truly academic periphasis which is as
dismally familiar to most faculty children as its blunt Anglo-Saxon
equivalent of "losing your job" is to children of plainer workpeople.
Once, it is true, this possibility had loomed up large before the
Marshalls, when a high-protection legislature objected loudly to the
professor's unreverent attitude towards the tariff. But although the
Marshall children knew all about this crisis, as they knew all about
everything that happened to the family, they had had no experience of
the anxious talks and heartsick consultations which would have gone
on in any other faculty household. Their father had been angry, and
their mother resolute--but there was nothing new in that. There had
been, on Professor Marshall's part, belligerent, vociferous talk about
"freedom of speech," and on Mrs. Marshall's a quiet estimate that, with
her early training on a Vermont farm, and with the high state of
cultivation under which she had brought their five acres, they could
successfully go into the truck-farming business like their neighbors.
Besides this, they had the resource, extraordinary among University
families, of an account in the savings-bank on which to fall back. They
had always been able to pay their debts and have a small surplus by the
expedient of refusing to acknowledge a tenth part of the social
obligations under which the rest of the faculty groaned and sweated

with martyr's pride. Perfidiously refusing to do their share in the
heart-breaking struggle to "keep up the dignity" of the academic
profession, they were not overwhelmed by the super-human difficulties
of that undertaking.
So it happened that the Marshall children heard no forebodings about
the future, but only heated statements of what seemed to their father the
right of a teacher to say what he believed. Professor Marshall had gone
of his own initiative to face the legislative committee which was
"investigating" him, had quite lost his temper (never very securely held
in leash), had told them his highly spiced opinion of their strictures on
his teaching and of the worth of any teacher they could find who would
submit to them. Then he had gone home and put on his overalls. This
last was rather a rhetorical flourish; for his cosmopolitan, urban youth
had left him ineradicably ignorant of the processes of agriculture. But
like all Professor Marshall's flourishes it was a perfectly sincere one.
He was quite cheerfully prepared to submit himself to his wife's
instruction in the new way of life.
All these picturesque facts, as was inevitable in America, had instantly
reached the newspapers, which, lacking more exciting news for the
moment, took that matter up with headlined characterizations of
Professor Marshall as a "martyr of the cause of academic freedom," and
other rather cheap phrases about "persecution" and "America, the land
of free speech." The legislative committee, alarmed, retreated from its
position. Professor Marshall had not "been obliged to hand in his
resignation," but quite the contrary, had become the hero of the hour
and was warmly complimented by his colleagues, who hoped to profit
by an action which none of them would have dared to imitate. It had
been an exciting drama to the Marshall children as long as it lasted.
They had looked with pride at an abominable reproduction of their
father's photograph in the evening paper of La Chance, and they had
added an acquaintance with the manners of newspaper reporters to their
already very heterogeneous experience with callers of every variety;
but of real anxiety the episode had brought them nothing.
As to that same extraordinary assortment of visitors at the Marshall

house, one of the University co-eds had said facetiously that you met
there every sort of person in the world, from spiritualists to
atheists--everybody except swells. The atheist of her dictum was the
distinguished and misanthropic old Professor Kennedy, head of the
Department of Mathematics, whose ample means and high social
connections with the leading family of La Chance made his
misanthropy a source of much chagrin to