Janet stood alone, her hands clenched in nervous tension. How passionately she resented her mother’s domestic tyranny! In the narrow, intolerant religious atmosphere of Brooklyn, she had endured it long enough, endured it since childhood as one of the mysterious dispensations of Providence. Her mind was flooded with hatred of the Barrs and all that they stood for. The Barrs were a characteristic product of the American environment. Mrs. Barr belonged to a decadent branch of an old Mayflower stock connected with the Bradleys, the Saltonstalls, and other well-known New England names. She had married the American born son of a Scotch immigrant; but, as she ruled him with a rod of iron, few traces of his gentler European parentage had slipped into the household or stayed there long if they had. For Mrs. Barr charged the family atmosphere to its full capacity with all the narrowness, harshness, and spitefulness of her own Puritan inheritance. Robert Lloyd had assured Janet that her family was as typical an American family as could be found east of the Alleghanies. Its Puritan (or rather, Impuritan) tradition was depressed still further (if that were possible) by contact with the low standard of living introduced during a century of reckless and promiscuous immigration. Its leading tradition was the enforcement of an absolute veto upon all social experiments, a veto springing not from love of life or regard for the community but from hatred of life and contempt for the individual. It was Robert, too, (in their brief acquaintance) who had pointed out that families like the Barrs were to be found everywhere in the wide world. But it was in backwater places like Brooklyn that they congregated densely enough to work mischief. It was from such points of concentration, all too numerous in America, that their outstanding traits spread like an infectious miasma upon all surrounding efforts at progress. Janet did not need to be told that one of these outstanding traits was a devotion to the cult of doing nothing. Doing nothing with a restless intermittency and an extravagant expenditure of undirected force. Doing nothing! Janet had learned that this was not the same as having nothing to do. It was a religion of serried "thou shalt nots" applied with passionate rigor to all adventurous departures from the routine of everyday life. Doing nothing meant the avoidance of actions contrary to custom, law, or the supposed requirements of comfort. As regards herself, it meant a studied observance of restrictions, which your own interpretation of law, or custom, or abstinent _appetite_ (with a light accent on the _appetite_) prescribed for you. As regards your fellow man, it meant his rigid observance of restrictions which not his, but your, interpretation of law, or custom, or _abstinent_ appetite (with a heavy accent on the _abstinent_) prescribed for _him_. It meant an aggressive policy of wholesale and indiscriminate prohibition.