PS 3500 A6 A52 ... ;..:. r PRN A. SAN DIEG 3 1822 01096 1415 HIGH ROAD PS The Highroad Ike Highroad BEING THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN AMBITIOUS MOTHER CHICAGO HERBERT S. STONE & COMPANY MCMIV COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY HERBERT S, STONE & COMPANY CHICAGO PRKSSOF STROMBERG, ALLEN & CO. CHICAGO 12845 PREFACE They call me the most successful mother in New York. This summer, with my tall Jane in her honeymoon, I am left alone, and I am taking a holiday in the house where I was born, in West Virginia in the hills. As I walk through the fields, poor, grown up in ragweed and the white boneset that I used to gather for "bitters" when I was a child, and realize that I am the mother-in-law of an Ambassador, an Earl with old Elizabethan houses mellowing in the English sunshine, a brilliant New York lawyer who may become anything and is now rich and well born and one of the greatest of American heiresses, my sense of humor is aroused. I am on the sunny side of fifty. Once I walked barefoot in the furrows of the very field where I am writing this, and dropped potatoes before my father's hoe! Sometimes in these late years when I have read the newspaper accounts of my "old Virginia family," it was hard to keep my face straight. But I did. In this world the successful always keep their faces straight. I have heard people who have not the power to do so at the important 5 Pref; ace moment, bitterly declare that success comes only to those who lack a sense of humor. It sometimes comes to those lacking that best sense, that complement of the other five, but rarely. The true secret of power is to see your actions in every light and then to choose the point of view which you will stand by and from which you will cause others to see you. Success does not consist altogether in seeing, but in being seen. But I will confess that I never encouraged a sense of humor in my girls. They never knew that we and our pretensions were altogether comical. They were real inasmuch as they believed in themselves at least while they were very young. Sometimes I have wanted a confidant until I ached. I have wanted to go to some level-headed, "broad-minded" person and tell the story and laugh. I have read a clever story now and then in which an Abbe figured. I have 'always had an ideal of an Abbe in my mind. If I had ever run across him I should have become a convert to Rome 'for no reason on earth except that I wanted a confidant. I could have been happy if my lot had been thrown with that Father Forbes, of whom Harold Frederic gave a bril- Preface 7 liant picture in Theron Ware. I am sure we should have been the best of friends. Having now no children of my own to settle, I would throw out as a hint to other mothers that there is a wonderful career for a poor, clever, ambitious boy in the Church. If my own boy had not early shown that the way of the world was his way, I should have put him there. The idle class in America is made up of women, and of men who think along feminine lines. They want a confidant. The woman does not dare make one of her husband. In the first place, he would refuse to understand, or he would be worried to death over a "hys terical wife" if he did understand. The priest or the clergyman who can fill this want is a "made" man. He must be a celibate. Some women find a confidant in a judiciously selected doctor. It is in the final and complete lack of an "other self," as the sentimental old maids say, that I am writing this. And then, I wish to see how the story looks when it is all finished. It will give me exactly the same sort of pleas ure that one has in looking at her own photo graph. I want to see how I look to my own critical eyes. 8 Pref; ace I here disclaim any idea of making a moral story, or a sentimental story, or any sort of story save a true story. If I neglect sometimes to write down the good in people and call attention to the bad that, too, is part of the portrait I am making of myself. What I see reveals my character also. 1 should be a fool to "fake" the story of my struggles to present a more pleasing picture, to paint a portrait of myself after the manner of Chartran. I believe in truly good people, but I do not hold as an article of that belief that they are the only happy people. The successful are the happy they and those who haven't the power to real ize that they are unhappy. I should not "rather be good than be happy." Would you? I am happy; and in this narrative I have not hidden my faults nor tried to explain them. Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes said that any one could write one interesting novel by tell ing the plain unvarnished tale of his own life. This narrative is made after that formula, and I can only hope that he told the truth, for I might say with Montaigne, "All the world knows me in my book." The Highroad i A Mother My father was the son of a hard-shell Bap tist preacher who wandered up and down the Ohio River preaching from a flat-boat. My grandmother was reported to be the daughter of a Kentucky farmer somewhere near Mays- ville, who was fascinated by my grandfather's tongue, and eloped with him. She died when my father was born, and he, a physically weak little creature, was brought up in careless fash ion among the people of the country who listened while my grandfather preached and took him home to dinner. I have sometimes thought that my grandfather, educated and in another environment, might have been that priest of whom I have dreamed. My father never spoke of this period of his life to me, but he talked to my mother, and she has told me something of it. He had no education whatever, as education is known to-day. He learned to read and o IO The Highroad write, and, a little later when he began to "trade," to keep rude accounts. I believe it was horses at first, and then anything, until he had acquired the farm here. I have often thought that had my father mar ried an ambitious woman, or even an ordinarily "smart" woman, he would have reached out into the world and become a man of substance and it may be wealth. But my mother was simply a rather stupid, pretty daughter of a farmer. It is from her that the Countess of Truesdale, who is my youngest daughter, in herits her delicate blonde beauty, which causes the English aristocracy to look heavy and overfed. Northern people, and even southern people of the present generation, have no idea of the position of the southern farmers of the non- slave-holding class before the Civil War. They were more surely outcasts than the negroes themselves. In the Virginia and Tennessee mountains 'their position was less noticeable than in the great plantation countries, but even there, "the quality" was a caste apart. It was to these outcasts that my father nelonged. My mother's people, by virtue of a dozen slaves (one family of negroes) were a A Mother it little higher in the social scale, and notwith standing the fact that my father was infinitely their superior in every possible way, my mother's people held themselves aloof. This attitude was very convenient to me later, as it freed me from the clog of their presence and blood claims. I have noticed this often in other families. Unless relatives are very good, a distinct advantage anywhere, they hamper. As Mr. Kipling says, "He travels fastest who travels alone." I was born just before the Civil War, and was old enough as it passed away to see that my father's sympathies were with "the Union," and my mother's with "the Rebels." I was taught by my father to sing: "Hang Jeff Davis on a Sour Apple Tree," and I knew that my mother treasured in the first place in her "album" a photograph of Wilkes Booth. I have that photograph still. It is part of our "local color," as southerners. But they did not quarrel. My father did as he pleased, and my mother resented nothing that was done by anybody. After the war the schools in our part of the country were improved, and by the time I was old enough to attend school, there were two 12 The Highroad sessions a year, making in all seven months, and I was sent there. The school house was of logs heated by a big iron stove in which wood was burned, and the teachers who came to us were the rawest of men, some of them men who had served in the war, and were seeking a way to fortune through the new state of West Virginia. When I was fifteen the man who became my husband came to the Bethel school. He was then a lank, shy, red-haired young man from Pennsylvania, with what my father called a "wonderful head fer figgers." After the school term was over for that year he stayed and opened a country store, giving groceries to the farmers for produce. They brought their crops and then their pork to him in exchange for coffee and tea and sugar, dry goods and "town-cured" hams. Then in the spring and early summer they would buy their own pork back at a slight increase in price, giving a lien on the coming crop. This method brought profits of about seventy-five per cent, but our customers did not discover it. It was that sense of seeing something which those about us did not see that first drew us apart from our neighbors, and caused us to look A Mother 13 upon ourselves as aloof from them. It was that more than our prosperity. We sometimes talked of the people and my husband wondered why the public <=chools did not teach them more. We finally came to the conclusion that they are not really taught anything but surface book-knowledge. They can add, multiply and subtract figures but not facts. There appears to be a wall between their learning, such as it is, and their actual living. The relation between the two, which is education, is un known to them. My husband in those early days talked to me of everything. There was one man who amused us very much. He had a piece of what is known as wild land, covered with heavy walnut timber. This was before the day of lumber companies in West Virginia. As he could produce nothing on his land (so he said) he wanted to sell it. My husband, in bargain ing, said that the land certainly could not be worth much to anybody, and the man finally accepted the offer that was made for it. Then my husband employed the late owner and his two sons to clear the land. The timber taken off more than paid for the labor and for the land, leaving my husband with the great tract 14 The Highroad of new land absolutely free of any cost what ever. Neither the man nor his sons saw any thing unusual in the transaction. By this perfectly legitimate method of carry ing on his business, it was not long before my husband owned large tracts of land. He was doing a banking and loan business in a small way, although his customers had no idea of it, nor do I believe had he. New York is always wondering at the coun trymen who come into the "street" and man age it "without previous experience." As a matter of fact, there are hundreds of men all over this country who are playing Wall Street's tricks every day of their lives, and never know it. When they discover it they come to town. The games have a different name in the country. Undoubtedly had my husband lived, my boy and girls would have been very rich, and it would not have been necessary for me to make the efforts through which I struggled for so many years. But I cannot call them anything but happy years. I was like a strong man shoot ing rapids. I might go to pieces any minute, but then it was all exhilarating sport, and if I came out into clear, deep water, it would be a A Mother 15 haven. I touched bottom and I touched rocks. Sometimes my boat swung in an eddy. Once it was all but capsized. A cold chill goes over me when I remember! I never expected to get out alive socially alive, that is. My two eldest girls, Lucile and Genevieve, are nearly the same age as nearly as they can be. Robert, my boy, is more than a year older. They belong to my more or less romantic period when I was beginning to read books. I called novels books, and I never thought of trying to read anything else. I cannot read novels now, but in those days I read Augusta J. Evans, Sir Walter Scott some times (I found him too remote, although inter esting at times), Disraeli, G. P. R. James, and any other book which told of people of wealth and position. They were text books to me. I have sometimes wondered why I did not find "Vanity Fair" a great book. I always thought Becky Sharp a fool. Clever people hold their own. They make the world respect them, and they are seldom found out. I had no advantages of education, not even Dr. Johnson's Diction ary, but I could teach Becky Sharp things that neither she nor her creator ever dreamed of. Of all of them I liked Disraeli best. He 1 6 The Highroad wrote of high life that he had actually seen. For every crumb of information concerning it I was eager and hungering. At the time the children were born we were living on the farm in a house my husband built soon after our marriage. It had four rooms and a kitchen. There was a wash house out side. I "did my own work," as they say in the country, with a deaf and dumb woman who was a sort of dependent of my father's to come in and do the washing. I made my children's clothes on the sewing machine that my hus band gave me on our first wedding anniversary, and as a matter of course my own clothes. Our sitting-room had an ingrain carpet on the floor, a rug with a lion in plush in the cen ter, a "set" of cane-seated chairs with a rocker, a coal stove. A Lady Washington's reception engraving (considered very grand), a "what not" with some vases and shells, and a bracket or two decorated the walls. We called it the parlor. My own bed-room was our real sitting-room. Here was a thick, and I know now, a beauti ful rag carpet, white curtains, an open fire, my sewing-machine, my bed, the trundle bed and the crib. A Mother 17 We had besides a "spare room" for chance visitors, a dining-room and the kitchen. A bath-room? There isn't a West Virginia farm er's family in this year 1904 that bathes every day. Not one, unless it is some "crank" who is considered crazy by his neighbors. There are not a dozen bath-rooms outside of the towns. A few years ago, I went back there to attend to some business, and an acquaintance of mine in Fowlersburg took me to see her daughter's new house, a modern "Queen Anne," not yet completed. Fowlersburg is now a town of fifteen thousand inhabitants. "Here," said my friend, "is the place the book said" (it was a house out of a builder's book) "to put a bath-room. But Mamie said she would rather have a sewing-room. In the summer time they could take their Saturday baths in the wash-house, and in the winter they wouldn't need them." And Mamie was a good girl and a good housekeeper. I have kept my friendship for a few of the old people in Fowlersburg, particularly those of the old families. Of course my children have never been there since early childhood. The 1 8 The Highroad ideals they have concerning the place and the people are perfectly beautiful. Let me beg all mothers who wish to be successful, never by any chance to wreck a child's ideals. If they once truly know, what they are talking about they must be geniuses to make other people see the ideal. I myself am something of a genius, but I never brought one into the world. My children thought they always told the truth. At least all but one, and her lapses could hardly be called keeping up an ideal. Early Days in Fowlersburg 19 II Early Days in Fowlersburg I like to linger on the days when I was learn ing, and day by day coming out of the general into the special. The town is interesting to me as the scene of my earliest attempts to live after the fash ion of the world to which I longed to belong. I wanted to be a part of it. I often think of the crowds of humanity and of how few of us there are who do more than jostle along and elbow our neighbors. When Shakespeare says, "All the world's a stage and all the men and women merely players," he is not exactly right. There is a stage, but only a few of us are the players. The rest make up the gaping audience. Sometimes a clown or a columbine sets up a booth at the street corner, but they are the tawdry "notorious. " Some of us are artists and play on the world's stage, strutting to heroics (too often) in the glare of limelight. We know that there is a place, often dingy and dark and unpleasant, where we put aside our splendors and sit down to solitude. 2O The Highroad It is our solace there to believe that the audience at least thinks us real. How many of us realize that the visible world about us is no measure of what is, but merely of what we are capable of seeing and understanding? Ghosts may walk for aught we know. Our poor little five senses are inade quate for our best uses, nature's grudging dole to us, mere pitiful tools to enable us to exist and work for that vague end she has in view so far beyond the limits of our vision. Your real novelist has something like second sight. He sees the realities behind the trivial little happenings which divert the common place minds. Life is a sleight-of-hand magi cian who plays her tricks while she fastens your attention somewhere else than on her object. The novelist, like Balzac or Hardy, smiles grimly and points out the machinery. I had from the beginning the wish to be one of those who played. I am not a remarkable woman to look at. I have always tried not to be. In those early years in Fowlersburg it was my ambition to win a solid foundation of re spect and a place. I did not want one woman ever to remember that her husband's eyes had rested upon me with the sort of admiration that Early Days in Fowlersburg 21 all women love for themselves and hate for another; but I wanted to be known. When we decided to leave the farm and go into town to live, I thought the matter over very carefully. My husband said that he wanted to go because he intended to open a general store there to dispose of the country produce that came in. By this time he had a chain of country stores through what are known as the "back counties" in West Vir ginia. And he also wanted to send the chil dren to school as they grew a little larger. "Give them advantages," he said. Lucile and Genevieve were five and six, Robert was seven, and Jane a baby. I lay awake a good many nights turning over in my mind this change of residence. I knew absolutely nobody in Fowlersburg. It was this which finally caused me to go there this, and the fact that I was little hampered by relatives. My father had no kinfolk that I knew. My mother had plenty, but they were, like her, quiet, shy people, who bothered nobody, and least of all my father's family. In these days my father and mother had acquired a taste which made them happy and contented alone. The old New York Ledger was then edited by 22 The Highroad Robert Bonner, who published every week installments of novels by Mrs. E. D. E. N. South- worth, Mrs. Harriet Lewis and other romance writers of that school. Four of these stories were published weekly. Besides, there were editorials by Henry Ward Beecher and James Parton, a correspondence column, and some short stories. It is impossible to tell this generation anything about the fascination of the old New York Ledger. My father and mother found sufficient amuse ment in keeping four intricate plots in their heads from week to week. I believe that not half as many farmer's wives went to the insane asylum in the days of the Ledger. I remember once going up home (my father's house was always "home") and finding father churning, with half the Ledger in one hand while he worked the dasher up and down with the other, and mother kneading bread, with the other half of the paper propped up behind the bread board. They always cut it in two when it came, and drew straws which should have the part containing Mrs. Southworth's story. When they had finished it I borrowed it and read it myself. I did not tell my husband why I hesitated Early Days in Fowlersburg 23 about going to Fowlersburg. There are some things a man cannot understand. I told him that I loved the country and my little home which was true. I had my work and my dreams. I hardly know whether it was in the Ledger or in some of the English novels in cheap edi tions that I was beginning to get my hands on, that I learned that a "tradesman" was not a social personage. To me a tradesman meant one thing: a storekeeper. I was trying to fig ure out some way in which we could slip away from that odium. Naturally I did not tell my husband that. Finally, one night, I had an idea. It was never my way to give my husband a joggle, waken him out of a sound sleep and expect him to discuss matters. He was a good hus band, but I doubt if there is any man suffi ciently perfect to enjoy that. But I felt that I must talk about it now. I arose from my bed, put on a pair of knitted slippers and a blue quilted dressing gown which I kept for slight illnesses, lighted the lamp and sat down by the fire. By this time, naturally, my husband was awake. "What is it, Mary?" he asked anxiously. "Are you sick?" 24 The Highroad "I have a suffocating feeling, " I said. "It hurt me to lie down." By this time he was over the side of the bed inquiring if I wanted the doctor. I was seldom ill, and it frightened him thoroughly awake. I said I was not ill. It was but a passing unhappiness, and he must go to sleep. In the effort to keep me from thinking I was ill, he began to talk and in five minutes I was mak ing my suggestions. He was in the humor to agree with me on any subject. Like all men whose whole happiness lies in their homes, a fear of illness in the wife is potent. Silly women, learning that, wear it out. In an hour we had agreed that instead of having a general retail store in Fowlersburg, we were to have a wholesale house, principally for tobacco, barrel staves and "ties" (the blocks of wood on which railroads are laid). I proved to my husband that his brain was so great that he should use it in making other men do the petty detail of work. When we went back to bed my suffocation was gone and my husband had a new set of ideas and a warm glow at his heart because his wife understood him. There was one point upon which I was firm. Early Days in Fowlersburg 25 My husband wanted to build a new house in town. He told me he could now afford a home which would cost five thousand dollars, and he had talked to Mr. Gallison, the chief carpenter in Fowlersburg who built all its houses, about making a plan. But I begged that just now he would not take five thousand dollars from his capital. With his cleverness that five thou sand dollars would increase faster than it would in real estate. The fact was, I knew that when a man buys a home or builds one, he is reluctant to move. I meant to know the town before I settled in one spot for a long term of years. In going to Fowlersburg there was another question the Church. My people naturally went to the Baptist church when they went anywhere. There was, however, no Baptist church in our neighborhood. Once a month there was preaching in the school house by a Methodist circuit rider. My parents had all the scorn for "sprinklers" that a Scotch Pres byterian has fora "Romanist." My husband's family in Pennsylvania had been Dunkards, but he kept no traces of it nor ever mentioned it. When I was twelve years old, my grand- 26 The Highroad father, who died the following year, took me two counties away to a Baptist Association. This is something like a Methodist Conference. Delegates are sent from all the churches round about, and as many other people come as wish to have a change of scene. The people in the place where the Association meets entertain them. I believe they still hold these meet ings, and I fancy in some parts of this my native state, the entertainment is as crude now as it was then. In this place where my grandfather and I went, there was but one house large enough to hold many guests, and it consisted chiefly of one big room and an enormous "porch." We ate on the "porch" and we all slept in that one big room. The farmer's wife, who must have been a very clever woman, sewed all her sheets and her neighbor's sheets together until she made one as big as the room. She had straw brought and put down on the floor a foot deep, then she made one enormous bed. The sleep ers lay in tiers. Have you ever seen the paint ing called "The Conquerors"? It represents the great captains of the world riding through Inferno, their way bordered by rows of the dead slain on victorious fields. It was in such Early Days in Fowlersburg 27 tiers that we slept on Mrs. Daggett's floor. In the center of each row a man and his wife would lie side by side. From his other side would go out a row of men, from hers a row of women. I didn't like it. After we were all settled one night, I called out to my grand father. Isaid: "Grandpap, were they sleeping like this when Ruth got up and lay at the feet of Boaz?" He reached over two ladies and a husband and slapped me. I had read of nothing like this in mysteries, and I imbibed the idea that Baptists were vul gar. As I grew a little older I knew that all "dissenters" were outcasts. What a dissenter was I didn't know only that he was something that did not belong to the Established Church. I thought we had an Establishment in Amer ica, and I believed it to be a sect. Naturally when I found we had nothing of the kind, my impulse was toward the Episcopalian church. A church is a club that any man can force his way into. But I was cautious, I did not want to make any mistakes. We went to Fowlersburg presently, taking a little house on the one central street. My husband had begun his business, and already 28 ^he Highroad knew all the business men. As he was pros perous and a little better educated than most of the men there, he became very speedily a leading citizen. The town was small then, with one paved sidewalk and about three thousand inhabitants. Socially it was fit for Mr. Thomas Hardy's consideration. The leading family was named Jones. Its founder was still alive; he was the illegitimate son of a roystering blade who was said to have had sons enough on the right and left hands in his congressional dis trict to send him to Congress when he was fifty. He use'd to acknowledge any that were brought to his notice, provided they were good looking or "smart." He always declared that he had brought no "lunk heads" into the world. The Fowlersburg Jones was acknowleged, and as his mother died at his birth he was adopted by his father's wife. Now and then the story of a woman's doing such a thing is told as though it were the unique act of self- sacrifice. In fact it happened hundreds of times before our civilization became so com plex. Mrs. Benjamin Franklin adopted her husband's illegitimate son. It is an American Early Days in Fowlersburg 29 habit to furnish the generations behind with the same set of ideas that controls this one. It is folly to say that an American woman will do that thing to-day, although I have heard men call it "a womanly thing to do." This man at this time was very old and had a large family of children and grandchildren. He had been educated, studied law, and had educated his children. They seemed to have a conviction that nobody knew of old Colonel (of militia) Jones's parentage. Heaven knows! They may not have known it themselves. If they did they had unusually thick skins. I have always much admired the idea of the old Colonel, coming back to the very county in which he was born to make his fight against his birth. The story couldn't follow him, because he met it on its own doorstep. But his family made itself an object of ridicule by the high and mighty airs affected. And yet, such is the power of assurance and audacity, it became the leading family of the town, although there were people there of gentle birth. The story of that one family would fill this book many times. Old Colonel Jones married a farmer's daughter, who was clever, and her sons were clever men; yet it is a curious 30 tfhe Highroad study to see how the original pair, the royster- ing grandfather and the weak farm girl have marked the generations. One of them caused me a bad half hour years ago by- suddenly claiming my acquaintance. She was yellow wigged and painted and perfumed and dia monded. There is a grandson in the peniten tiary, they tell me now. After all, there is something in having your blood honest. There was another family, very intimate with this one in a surface fashion, that was equally amusing to the lover of comedy. Do not imagine that my sense of humor was suffi ciently cultivated in those days to appreciate the situation at its true value. It took years and experience for me to get my glass adjusted. But it was there all the time for the seeing eye. The name of this second family was Lossing, and it was what my father would have called "chief cook and bottle washer" (to think of the grandfather of my girls saying a vulgar thing like that!), in the Episcopal church. This made another example of the power of assurance. Then there were two women, sisters they said, and the meek little husband of one of them who kept books while his womenkind Early Days in Fowlersburg 31 taught music and disseminated gossip. He was a bookkeeper for my husband for a time, a position which he lost very suddenly after I had heard the reading of my character which the music teacher gave. Poor things! Fow lersburg made the appalling discovery one day that instead of being Berlin Protestants as they were supposed to be, German born, they were Baltimore Jews who had dropped their religion as unprofitable. Never shall I forget the pall which fell that day upon the church which they had deceived. I shared in it, for I naturally became an Episcopalian. 32 'The Highroad III We 'Take a House According to Mr. Herbert Spencer, each of us is the result of environment. I suppose I am one of the exceptions which proves the rule. Otherwise, I should give a careful study of Fowlersburg society at this time that the stu dents of human nature (myself included), for whose pleasure and enlightenment this history is written, might see the forces which created me. These people taught me little except what to avoid. I used to look at the women who had grown old in contentment in Fowlersburg and won der. They were, some of them, women of beauty, with small but certain incomes, with fairly good families. They had a chance I had never had, and yet they had been content to live all their lives in a little round of gossip and housekeeping. They felt satisfied when their daughters married the first young man who presented himself. Of course I had done the same thing, but I had no choice and looked far beyond for my own children. We Take a House 33 My ignorance was such in those days that I actually expected the people who made up the little society in Fowlersburg to live like the people in my English novels. These novels were my text-books and my only ones. Natu rally, I tried to form my own simple household upon their models. It was a little while before I realized how different it was from the ways of other people and how fortunate for me. They, dear simple souls, could not conceive of anybody doing anything, particularly anything so simple as the ordering of a household in any other manner than the manner in which she had been brought up. I had two servants now one was a nurse for the children and the other the general servant that was customary in the town. The wages of a "girl," as this general servant was called, ranged from a dollar and a quarter to two dol lars a week. I didn't know that. I had never had a servant, but only a woman to work by the day. I had given her fifty cents a day. Naturally I concluded that this was the proper wage. My husband paid his men by the month. I consequently told the first servant who applied that I paid fifteen dollars a month. This may sound most trivial, but I discovered later that 34 The Highroad no circus which came to Fowlersburg with bands and posters and parades ever so successfully advertised as I did by that simple statement. This move might have made me most un popular except that I was following my text books. I asked for a recommendation from the last mistress and I would not take a servant without it. This effectually prevented my com mitting that unpardonable sin, known in Fow lersburg as "coaxing off other people's girls." I finally by this means secured two sisters, the daughters of a respectable farmer. In deed, they were of about the same origin as my own, a fact which I did not then acknowledge even to myself. I knew how to cook, and with the aid of a cook book I managed to teach the really intelligent elder girl ways which not only filled her with awe but sent her about proudly proclaiming that she didn't live with "common people." I had of course supposed that society in Fowlersburg, which seemed to me then like a metropolis, ate its dinners in the evening according to my English novel standards. I didn't quite dare ask my husband to do that. But as a country breakfast, dinner and supper are almost identical in constituents, I had no We Take a House 35 difficulty. The servants simply called the dinner "luncheon," and the supper "dinner." My husband thought (if the innovation gave his busy brain a thought at all) that it was the servants' peculiarity instead of mine. It was the same with another thing which seems too trivial to mention, and yet its prac tice made a difference. That was the "Papa" and "Mamma" by which my children ad dressed us. I had said "Pap" and "Mother," but I had the children say Father and Mother, because the French Papa and Mamma would have been impossible of pronunciation to me in my country home. With the coming of the new servants the change was easy. They un consciously taught the children what I told them to say. Does this seem too trivial? Believe me, it is of trifles that life, or at any rate, social life is made. At this time we had a regular income of about seven thousand dollars a year but we spent about twenty-five hundred and were rich. How I struggled over that little house in which we lived! We went into the house at the period of black wall paper and shaded rooms. I wonder if the memory of anyone else goes back to that time. I believe they called 36 'The Highroad it Morris paper, and it was supposed to have something to do with sunflowers and aestheti- cism. Living in the country and on old fash ioned English novels, this movement escaped me. I had not even a friend to tell me of it. I never read a newspaper, seldom a magazine. I could only follow the lines of the English "cottages" I read of, and work in chintz. "The ladies' morning room" was always chintz with "bunches of roses" in my novels. Entering now into a place where I could let myself "go," I also had a morning room, and it was done in chintz with bunches of roses. In some of the early reprints of English books, were copied the good English illustra tions by men like Frederick Leighton and Fred Walker. When these represented interiors I pinned my faith to them. Low book shelves, wicker chairs and a tea table, wide couches with chintz flounces, draped dressing tables I had them all. Nobody will ever know the bitterness of my mortification at discovering, when I went to return my visits, that I was all out of fashion, that I ought to have had black wall paper and a dark carpet, and dingy curtains. But I had the chintz and wicker and I couldn't afford to We Take a House 37 change them, so I made the best of them. Like anything else you make the best of, other people came in a little time, to copying them and envying me the possession of them. They, too, most of them, had read an English novel or two (there seemed to be nothing else to read in those days), and "morning room" and "draw ing-room" finished in chintz sounded as ele gant to them as the "lark rising to meet the sun" sounded poetic when they read it in newspaper verses. That every room in my little cottage was morning room and afternoon room, too, was as unsuspected by them as that America has no lark. Again 1 must call attention to that curious lack of application by the majority of peo ple of what they know. My new acquaint ances looked upon me as a superior sort of per son because I had possessions of which they had read. Even the fact that my children wore white pinafores like those in English illustra tions and had their pretty fair hair brushed down their backs, made them in a sense superior. There was not a woman in the town who could not have done what I did, who had not my information. What she lacked was the con nection between information and action. 38 The Highroad I shall never forget the sensation when I gave some callers afternoon tea, from my "drawing-room" tea table. My servants told me how they heard of it everywhere and people wanted to know if' it was a regular meal and if we had anything after it. That was long before the day of wrought-iron tea kettles and the souvenir spoons which became in 1888 as gen eral as upright pianos. But these things were not funny to me in those days. I was blundering along after the only model I had. I knew these village women to be far above me in breeding, educa tion, everything. I was humble before them. I had come there believing that "society" in one place was exactly like society in another, and I was trying my best to take my place by behaving as nearly like a respectable English duchess as circumstances would per mit. I even had the conscience of the good Duchess in those days. I used to search my soul and dream of the higher life. Oh, how the comedy of it has come like a sharp scent in my nostrils since, half a pleasure and half a pain, poor ignorant me truckling to the Joneses and the Mendals! I Become the Head of the Family 39 IV / Become the Head of the Family I wish that I could keep this narrative in Fowlersburg a little longer. There were so many people there that I should enjoy writing about telling even to myself, if this story is never read by another what I saw below the surface they believed themselves to present to the world. There was Mr. Bliss, the clergyman. He was, I heard later, the son of a Methodist book agent up in Pennsylvania somewhere. He had infinite tact and a "beautiful manner." Some times he took afternoon tea with me and talked about the age of confirmation, or neatly demol ished heresy. He was as easy in his acquired theology as I in my own new manners. We each had the air of inheritors. We played the game as solemnly as two children who are "dressing up." We lived in Fowlersburg for seven years. I have heard since, many times, in many a roundabout way, that the people in the town who knew me "cannot understand" my sue- 4O 'xbe Highroad cess. They call it luck. They remind them selves and each other what an "ordinary, quiet, plain little woman" I was. They give my children credit for having developed a wonder ful talent for social conquest, and they speak of the remarkable influence of a foreign educa tion and the opportunities for meeting men of title and fortune in the old world. I believe myself to be responsible for the breaking up of several respectable and ambitious Fowlersburg families whose fathers toil at law office or "store" while the wives and children live in pensions in Rome or Paris waiting for my "luck." It is pitiful, isn't it? They have no sort of conception that to be a "plain, quiet little woman" was my success in Fowlersburg. My husband died. His death came after one of the journeys 10 the hills he had been taking very frequently lately, and the typhoid pneumonia, which strikes so swiftly in West Virginia, had waited for a moment of extra fatigue in his hard-work ing life to find him defenseless. It is the custom in West Virginia to bury the dead within thirty-six hours but I couldn't. By delaying the funeral four days, I uncon- I Become the Head of the Family 41 sciously added another instance to my record of doing everything "in style" (as they said). They all knew that in the east (everything beyond Harper's Ferry is "the east") they delayed funerals. My husband had been caught by death at an unlucky moment. He had made moves which he alone understood for his methods of doing business had become swift, and it was impos sible to consult me on every transaction. He had purchased wild land. He had planned to build railroads through the back counties of West Virginia where there was then not a church nor a school house, and where the in habitants were as wild as the Scotch in the days of James I. Mark Twain has accused Sir Walter Scott of creating the southern feuds by setting up a false idea of chivalry a generation or two ago, which has degenerated with the people. He leaves out of consideration the fact that these people are the actual descendants of the blood of which Walter Scott wrote. They have de generated in some instances, and in some have remained simply stationary, giving the appear ance of degeneration in the light of the present day. 42 The Highroad I have heard old border ballads sung at a back county "play party' ' where they danced to the tunes they sang themselves instead of to a fiddle. They called the dances "plays. " One of the popular ones is called "Over the Water to Charlie." They have not the faintest idea that such a person as Charlie Stuart ever lived, but the children know the song even to-day. Like Queen Victoria, I date my later life from the beginning of my widowhood. It was an event that had never entered into our calcu lations. My husband was so strong, so certain. When in those early days I looked forward, it was to becoming the great lady of West Vir ginia. After a while we should have a place somewhere in the mountains, a great game preserve, and we should be the important people, spending our winters in Washington. I am sure that had I kept a diary then and recorded my day dreams, I should find on turn ing the leaves that I had destined one of my girls for a President's wife, and one for a Sen ator's wife. My boy was to have been a Sen ator himself. That was before the days when it came to be so generally understood that a Senatorship is sometimes for sale. Now I know that my husband would probably have I Become the Head of the Family 43 had one had he lived, and 1 suppose in that case Fowlersburg would have pointed him out as another wonderful genius with a poor idiot for a wife. These plans were too great for my carrying out, although everything was left to me. My husband trusted me. As for the executors of my husband's will, one a bank cashier named Less, and the other one an honest conservative old lawyer who had once been the governor of the state, they gave me to understand that they feared that my husband's illness had been corn ing on for some time and that his brain had been affected, judging by his investments. They told me that I could count upon noth ing from these wild lands. It was impossible to sell them at any price. This worthless land became my most valu able asset. Everything depends upon the use to which you put a thing. The Kohinoor would not save a man from starving if nobody knew he owned it, while one could live for a long time on a few paste diamonds that people believed to be real. After my husband was buried I insisted upon having the stores sold and everything put into safe securities, so that I knew my income ex- 44 2^