With the Procession | Page 8

her mind. No; she made her own year after
year, and poured it out into her little glass tumblers, and sealed each
tumbler with a half-sheet of notepaper, and marked each sheet
according to the sort of jelly it protected--sometimes she made grape or
crab-apple, too. She doled out her products very economically during
the winter and spring. Then she would discover, about the first of June,
that she had a three months' supply still on hand. Then, during the
summer, the family would live on jelly and little else.
But she remained, year after year, the same firm, determined,
peremptory person in her kitchen; she never spared herself there, and
she never spared anybody else.
She gave no more quarter at the front of the house than at the back. To
get fresh air into her dim and time-worn parlor and to keep sun and dust
and smoke out--this was her one besetting problem. There were those
windy days at the end of autumn, after the sprinkling-carts had been
withdrawn from the boulevard; there were the days (about three
hundred and sixty-five in the year) when the smoke and cinders from
the suburban trains made her house as untidy as a switch-yard; and
there was her husband's unconquerable propensity for smoking--a
pleasure which she compelled him to take outside on the foot pavement.
Here, on pleasant evenings, he would walk up and down alone, in a
slow, meditative fashion--having little to say and nobody to say it
to--until bedtime came.
This came early--from a habit early formed. The Chicago of his young
married life had given him little reason for being abroad after half-past
nine at night, and he appeared to find little more reason now than then.
It would not, indeed, have been impossible to make him see that, in the

interval, balls, concerts, spectacles, and such-like urban doings had
come on with increasing number and brilliancy, and that there were
now more interests to justify a man in remaining up until half-past ten,
or even until eleven. But you could not have convinced him that all
these opportunities were his.
Yet the consciousness of festivities sometimes obtruded upon his
indifference. Now and then on summer evenings, when the wind was
from the west, certain brazen discords originating a street or two behind
the house would come to advise him that the Circassian girl was on
view, or that a convention of lady snake-charmers was in session. Then
there would be weeks of winter nights when the frozen macadam in
front of the house would ring with a thousand prancing hoofs and
rumble for an hour with a steady flow of carriages, and the walls of the
great temple of music a few hundred yards to the north would throw
back all this clamor, with the added notes of slamming doors and
shouted numbers and epic struggles between angry drivers and
determined policemen; sometimes he would extend his smoking stroll
far enough to skirt the edge of all this Babel. Then, towards midnight,
long after all staid and sensible people were abed, the flood would roll
back, faster yet under the quiet moon, louder yet through the frosty air.
But he never met the Circassian beauty, and he would have found
"l'Africaine," for example, both tedious and unreasonable. To him each
of these publics was new, and no less new than alien. Besides, it would
have seemed an uncanny thing to be abroad and stirring at midnight.
Why did he go to bed at half-past nine? In order that he might be at the
store by half-past seven. Why must he be at the store by half-past seven?
Because a very large area to the west and northwest of the town looked
to him for supplies of teas, coffees, spices, flour, sugar, baking-powder;
because he had always been accustomed to furnish these supplies;
because it was the only thing he wanted to do; because it was the only
thing he could do; because it was the only thing he was pleased and
proud to do; because it was the sole thing which enabled him to look
upon himself as a useful, stable, honored member of society.
But it need not be supposed that the Marshalls in their young married

days had lived totally bereft of social diversion. Quite the contrary.
They had had tea-parties and card-parties now and then, and more than
once they had thrown their house open for a church sociable. But the
day came when the church jumped from its old site three blocks away
to a new site three miles away. And by that time most of their old
neighbors and fellow church-members had gone too--some southward,
some northward, some heavenward. Then business, in the guise of big
hotels, began marching down the street upon them,