National Avenue by Booth Tarkington (book recommendations website .txt) 📕

Harlan did not go into the giant business, yet he grew up looking down on all giants, since they all failed to reach the somewhat arbitrary nine feet he had set for them. He could not give credit to a struggling giant of seven feet and a half, and admire him for the difficulties overcome in getting to be at least that tall; Harlan really looked down upon such a giant from a height of nine feet.

Yet he was able, at times, to perceive his superiority as an unendearing characteristic and even to look upon it with some philosophic detachment; he did not resent his grandmother’s remarks upon that subject. What he minded was her assumption that he was trying to take Dan’s place in Martha Shelby’s heart; Harlan wanted his own place there, or none.

He had wanted it ever since Martha was a handsome romping girl of fourteen and he a fastidious observer a little older. She was a romp, yet her boyish romping never lacked a laughing charm; for, although she was one of those big young girls who seem to grow almost overwhelmingly, she had the fortunate gift of gracefulness; she was somehow able to be large without ever being heavy. And one evening at a “German” for young people of the age that begins to be fretful about a correct definition of the word “children,” she danced lightly to Harlan and unexpectedly “favoured” him; whereupon something profound straightway happened to the boy’s emotions.

No visible manifestations betrayed the change within so self-contained a youth; for here his pride, deep-set even then, was touched;⁠—the lively Martha’s too obvious preference was always for the brother so much more of her own sort. Dan was her fellow-romp, and she would come shouting under the Oliphants’ windows for him as if she were a boy. They were an effervescent pair, and often rough in their horseplay with each other; while Harlan, aloof and cold of eye, would watch them with an inward protest so sharp that it made him ache.

He wanted to make Martha over from a model of his own devising; he wished her to be more dignified, and could not understand her childish love of what to him seemed mere senseless caperings with the boisterous Dan. Yet neither her caperings nor her devotion to Dan was able to disperse Harlan’s feeling for her, which gradually became a kind of customary faint pain. In a little time⁠—a year or two⁠—the caperings ceased; Martha went eastward, as did the brothers, for the acquisition of a polish believed to be richer in that direction; and when she returned she had become dignified, as Harlan wished, but otherwise did not appear to be greatly altered. Certainly her devotion to Dan was the same; and her merely becoming dignified failed to alleviate that customary faint pain of Harlan’s. He still had it, and with it his long mystification;⁠—he had never been able to understand why she cared for Dan.

Harlan’s view of his brother as a rather foolish person might have meant no more than superiority’s tolerant amusement, had that pain and mystification of his not been involved; but, as matters were, Harlan would have been superior indeed if all bitterness had passed him by. He could have submitted, though with a sorrowing perplexity, to Martha’s inability to be in love with him; but what sometimes drove him to utter a burst of stung laughter was the thought that she had given her heart to a man who did not even perceive the gift. To Harlan that seemed to be the supreme foolishness of his foolish brother.

Through the rain, as he opened his own gate, he saw in the direction of the house next door a line of faintly glowing oblongs, swept across by wet black silhouettes of tossing foliage; and since these lighted windows at Martha’s were all downstairs, he concluded that she must have callers; for when she was alone she went up to her own room to read, and just before nine o’clock Mr. Shelby put out all the lights of the lower floor. The old gentleman was sensitive about uselessly high gas bills, in spite of the fact that he was, himself, to an almost exclusive extent, the company that produced the gas.

In the vestibule at his own door Harlan furled his umbrella, shook the spray from his waterproof overcoat, and was groping in his waistcoat pocket for the latchkey, when his mother unexpectedly opened the door for him from the inside. “I was standing at a window looking out, and saw you come up the walk,” she explained. “Your mackintosh looks soaking wet; you must be drowned! The doctor was here again awhile ago and says Lena’s doing splendidly, and the nurse just told me she and the baby are both asleep. Come into the library and dry off. Your father’s gone to bed, but he lit the fire for you before he went up. We were afraid you’d be chilled. How did you find mother?”

“About the same, I should say.” Harlan hung his dripping overcoat upon the ponderous walnut hatrack, the base of which was equipped for such emergencies with a pair of iron soup plates in a high state of ornamentation. Then he followed his mother into the library and went to sit by the fire, extending his long legs to its warmth, so that presently the drenched light shoes he wore began to emit a perceptible vapour.

“You ought to have worn your rubbers,” Mrs. Oliphant said reproachfully; and then as he only murmured “Oh, no,” in response, she said in a tone of inquiry: “I suppose you didn’t happen to see anything of Dan?”

“Not very likely! Not much to be seen between here and grandma’s just now except night and water.”

“I suppose so,” she assented. “I thought possibly you might have gone somewhere else after you left mother’s.”

“No.” But there had been something a little perturbed in her voice and he turned to look at her. “Were you