The Kentons | Page 4

Dean Howells

I.

The Kentons were not rich, but they were certainly richer than the
average in the pleasant county town of the Middle West, where they
had spent nearly their whole married life. As their circumstances had
grown easier, they had mellowed more and more in the keeping of their
comfortable home, until they hated to leave it even for the short outings,
which their children made them take, to Niagara or the Upper Lakes in
the hot weather. They believed that they could not be so well anywhere
as in the great square brick house which still kept its four acres about it,
in the heart of the growing town, where the trees they had planted with
their own hands topped it on three aides, and a spacious garden opened
southward behind it to the summer wind. Kenton had his library, where
he transacted by day such law business as he had retained in his own
hands; but at night he liked to go to his wife's room and sit with her
there. They left the parlors and piazzas to their girls, where they could
hear them laughing with the young fellows who came to make the
morning calls, long since disused in the centres of fashion, or the
evening calls, scarcely more authorized by the great world. She sewed,
and he read his paper in her satisfactory silence, or they played
checkers together. She did not like him to win, and when she found
herself unable to bear the prospect of defeat, she refused to let him
make the move that threatened the safety of her men. Sometimes he
laughed at her, and sometimes he scolded, but they were very good
comrades, as elderly married people are apt to be. They had long ago
quarrelled out their serious differences, which mostly arose from such
differences of temperament as had first drawn them together; they
criticised each other to their children from time to time, but they atoned
for this defection by complaining of the children to each other, and they
united in giving way to them on all points concerning their happiness,
not to say their pleasure.
They had both been teachers in their youth before he went into the war,
and they had not married until he had settled himself in the practice of
the law after he left the army. He was then a man of thirty, and five
years older than she; five children were born to them, but the second
son died when he was yet a babe in his mother's arms, and there was an
interval of six years between the first boy and the first girl. Their eldest
son was already married, and settled next them in a house which was
brick, like their own, but not square, and had grounds so much less

ample that he got most of his vegetables from their garden. He had
grown naturally into a share of his father's law practice, and he had
taken it all over when Renton was elected to the bench. He made a
show of giving it back after the judge retired, but by that time Kenton
was well on in the fifties. The practice itself had changed, and had
become mainly the legal business of a large corporation. In this form it
was distasteful to him; he kept the affairs of some of his old clients in
his hands, but he gave much of his time, which he saved his
self-respect by calling his leisure, to a history of his regiment in-the
war.
In his later life he had reverted to many of the preoccupations of his
youth, and he believed that Tuskingum enjoyed the best climate, on the
whole, in the union; that its people of mingled Virginian,
Pennsylvanian, and Connecticut origin, with little recent admixture of
foreign strains, were of the purest American stock, and spoke the best
English in the world; they enjoyed obviously the greatest sum of
happiness, and had incontestibly the lowest death rate and divorce rate
in the State. The growth of the place was normal and healthy; it had
increased only to five thousand during the time he had known it, which
was almost an ideal figure for a county-town. There was a higher
average of intelligence than in any other place of its size, and a wider
and evener diffusion of prosperity. Its record in the civil war was less
brilliant, perhaps, than that of some other localities, but it was fully up
to the general Ohio level, which was the high-water mark of the
national achievement in the greatest war of the greatest people under
the sun. It, was Kenton's pride and glory that he had been a part of the
finest army known in history. He believed that the men