One way out : $b A middle-class New-Englander emigrates to AmericaBartlett, Frederick Orin
General
One way out : $b A middle-class New-Englander emigrates to America
Bartlett, Frederick Orin
Political fiction; United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918 -- Fiction
I don't think a Carleton ever boarded when first married. To me it
wouldn't have seemed like getting married. I knew a suburb where some
of the men I had met at the country club lived and we went out there.
It was a beautiful June day and everything looked clean and fresh. We
found a little house of eight rooms that we knew we wanted as soon as
we saw it. It was one of a group of ten or fifteen that were all very
much alike. There was a piazza on the front and a little bit of lawn
that looked as though it had been squeezed in afterwards. In the rear
there was another strip of land where we thought we might raise some
garden stuff if we put it in boxes. The house itself had a front hall
out of which stairs led to the next floor. To the right there was a
large room separated by folding doors with another good-sized room
next to it which would naturally be used as a dining room. In the rear
of this was the kitchen and besides the door there was a slide through
which to pass the food. Upstairs there were four big rooms stretching
the whole width of the house. Above these there was a servant's room.
The whole house was prettily finished and in the two rooms down stairs
there were fireplaces which took my eye, although they weren't bigger
than coal hods. It was heated by a furnace and lighted by electricity
and there were stained glass panels either side of the front door.
The rent was forty dollars a month and I signed a three years' lease
before I left. The next week was a busy one for us both. We bought
almost a thousand dollars' worth of furniture on the installment plan
and even then we didn't seem to get more than the bare necessities. I
hadn't any idea that house furnishings cost so much. But if the bill
had come to five times that I wouldn't have cared. The installments
didn't amount to very much a week and I already saw Morse promoted and
myself filling his position at twenty-five hundred. I hadn't yet got
over the feeling I had at eighteen that life was a big adventure and
that a man with strong legs and a good back _couldn't_ lose. With Ruth
at my side I bought like a king. Though I never liked the idea of
running into debt this didn't seem like a debt. I had only to look
into her dear blue eyes to feel myself safe in buying the store
itself. Ruth herself sometimes hesitated but, as I told her, we might
as well start right and once for all as to go at it half heartedly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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