In the process of that expansion from a New England village to an American
town of which Putney spoke, Hatboro' had suffered one kind of deterioration
which Annie could not help noticing. She remembered a distinctly
intellectual life, which might still exist in its elements, but which
certainly no longer had as definite expression. There used to be houses in
which people, maiden aunts and hale grandmothers, took a keen interest in
literature, and read the new books and discussed them, some time after they
had ceased to be new in the publishing centres, but whilst they were still
not old. But now the grandmothers had died out, and the maiden aunts had
faded in, and she could not find just such houses anywhere in Hatboro'.
The decay of the Unitarians as a sect perhaps had something to do with
the literary lapse of the place: their highly intellectualised belief had
favoured taste in a direction where the more ritualistic and emotional
religions did not promote it: and it is certain that they were no longer
the leading people.
It would have been hard to say just who these leading people were. The old
political and juristic pre-eminence which the lawyers had once enjoyed was
a tradition; the learned professions yielded in distinction to the growing
wealth and plutocratic influence of the prosperous manufacturers; the
situation might be summed up in the fact that Colonel Marvin of the shoe
interest and Mr. Wilmington now filled the place once held by Judge Kilburn
and Squire Putney. The social life in private houses had undoubtedly
shrunk; but it had expanded in the direction of church sociables, and it
had become much more ecclesiastical in every way, without becoming more
religious. As formerly, some people were acceptable, and some were not;
but it was, as everywhere else, more a question of money; there was an
aristocracy and a commonalty, but there was a confusion and a more ready
convertibility in the materials of each.
The social authority of such a person as Mrs. Gerrish was not the only
change that bewildered Annie, and the effort to extend her relations with
the village people was one from which she shrank till her consciousness had
more perfectly adjusted itself to the new conditions. Meanwhile Dr. Morrell
came to call the night after their tea at the Putneys', and he fell into
the habit of coming several nights in the week, and staying late. Sometimes
he was sent for at her house by sick people, and he must have left word at
his office where he was to be found.
He had spent part of his student life in Europe, and he looked back to his
travel there with a fondness that the Old World inspires less and less in
Americans. This, with his derivation from one of the unliterary Boston
suburbs, and his unambitious residence in a place like Hatboro', gave her
a sense of provinciality in him. On his part, he apparently found it droll
that a woman of her acquaintance with a larger life should be willing
to live in Hatboro' at all, and he seemed incredulous about her staying
after summer was over. She felt that she mystified him, and sometimes she
felt the pursuit of a curiosity which was a little too like a psychical
diagnosis. He had a way of sitting beside her table and playing with her
paper-cutter, while he submitted with a quizzical smile to her endeavours
to turn him to account. She did not mind his laughing at her eagerness (a
woman is willing enough to join a man in making fun of her femininity if
she believes that he respects her), and she tried to make him talk about
Hatboro', and tell her how she could be of use among the working people.
She would have liked very much to know whether he gave his medical service
gratis among them, and whether he found it a pleasure and a privilege to do
so. There was one moment when she would have liked to ask him to let her be
at the charges of his more indigent patients, but with the words behind her
lips she perceived that it would not do. At the best, it would be taking
his opportunity from him and making it hers. She began to see that one
ought to have a conscience about doing good.