The Whole Family | Page 3

we. I always want a dish of something hot. My wife thinks cake is light, but I think meat is."
"Well, cake is the New England superstition," I observed. "And I suppose York State, too."
"Yes, more than pie is," he agreed. "For supper, anyway. You may have pie at any or all of the three meals, but you have GOT to have cake at tea, if you are anybody at all. In the place where my wife lived, a woman's social standing was measured by the number of kinds of cake she had."
We laughed at that, too, and then there came a little interval and I said, "Your place is looking fine."
He turned his head and gave it a comprehensive stare. "Yes, it is," he admitted. "They tell me it's an ugly old house, and I guess if my girls, counting my daughter-in-law, had their way, they would have that French roof off, and something Georgian--that's what they call it--on, about as quick as the carpenter could do it. They want a kind of classic front, with pillars and a pediment; or more the Mount Vernon style, body yellow, with white trim. They call it Georgian after Washington?" This was obviously a joke.
"No, I believe it was another George, or four others. But I don't wonder you want to keep your house as it is. It expresses something characteristic." I saved myself by forbearing to say it was handsome. It was, in fact, a vast, gray-green wooden edifice, with a mansard-roof cut up into many angles, tipped at the gables with rockets and finials, and with a square tower in front, ending in a sort of lookout at the top, with a fence of iron filigree round it. The taste of 1875 could not go further; it must have cost a heap of money in the depreciated paper of the day.
I suggested something of the kind to my neighbor, and he laughed. "I guess it cost all we had at the time. We had been saving along up, and in those days it used to be thought that the best investment you could make was to put your money in a house of your own. That's what we did, anyway. I had just got to be superintendent of the Works, and I don't say but what we felt my position a little. Well, we felt it more than we did when I got to be owner." He laughed in good-humored self-satire. "My wife used to say we wanted a large house so as to have it big enough to hold me, when I was feeling my best, and we built the largest we could for all the money we had. She had a plan of her own, which she took partly from the house of a girl friend of hers where she had been visiting, and we got a builder to carry out her idea. We did have some talk about an architect, but the builder said he didn't want any architect bothering around HIM, and I don't know as SHE did, either. Her idea was plenty of chambers and plenty of room in them, and two big parlors one side of the front door, and a library and dining-room on the other; kitchen in the L part, and girl's room over that; wide front hall, and black-walnut finish all through the first floor. It was considered the best house at the time in Eastridge, and I guess it was. But now, I don't say but what it's old-fashioned. I have to own up to that with the girls, but I tell them so are we, and that seems to make it all right for a while. I guess we sha'n't change."
He continued to stare at the simple-hearted edifice, so simple-hearted in its out-dated pretentiousness, and then he turned and leaned over the top of the fence where he had left his arms lying, while contemplating the early monument of his success. In making my journalistic study, more or less involuntary, of Eastridge, I had put him down as materially the first man of the place; I might have gone farther and put him down as the first man intellectually. We folk who have to do more constantly with reading and writing are apt to think that the other folk who have more to do with making and marketing have not so much mind, but I fancy we make a mistake in that now and then. It is only another kind of mind which they have quite as much of as we have of ours. It was intellectual force that built up the Plated-Ware Works of Eastridge, where there was no other reason for their being, and it was mental grip that held constantly to the management, and finally grasped the