industrious life than their four creditable grown-up
children or Judge Emery's honorable reputation at the bar. In their
youth they had conceived of certain things as worth attaining. They had
worked hard for these things and their unabashed pleasure in possessing
them had the vivid and substantial quality which comes from a keen
memory of battles with a world none too ready to grant human desires.

The two older children, George and Marietta, could remember those early
struggling days with almost as fresh an emotion as that of their
parents. Indeed, Marietta, now a competent, sharp-eyed matron of
thirty-two, could not see the most innocuous colored lithograph without
an uncontrollable wave of bitterness, so present to her mind was the
period when they painfully groped their way out of chromos.

The date of that epoch coincided with the date of their first
acquaintance with the Hollisters. The Hollisters were Endbury's First
Family; literally so, for they had come up from their farm in Kentucky
to settle in Endbury when it was but a frontier post. It was a part of
their superiority over other families that their traditions took
cognizance of the time when great stumps from the primeval forest stood
in what was now Endbury's public square, the hub of interurban trolley
traffic, whence the big, noisy cars started for their infinitely
radiating journeys over the flat, fertile country about the little city.
The particular Mrs. Hollister who, at the time the Emerys began to
pierce the upper crust, was the leader of Endbury society, had discarded
chromos as much as five years before. Mrs. Emery and Marietta, newly
admitted to the honor of her acquaintance, wondered to themselves at the
cold monotony of her black and white engravings. The artlessness of this
wonder struck shame to their hearts when they chanced to learn that the
lady had repaid it with a worldly-wise amusement at their own
highly-colored waterfalls and snow-capped mountain-peaks. Marietta
could recall as piercingly as if it were yesterday, in how crestfallen a
chagrin she and her mother had gazed at their parlor after this
incident, their disillusioned eyes open for the first time to the
futility of its claim to sophistication. As for the incident that had
led to the permanent retiring from their table of the monumental
salt-and-pepper "caster" which had been one of their most prized wedding
presents, the Emerys refused to allow themselves to remember it, so