fingers and then saying in a hoarse, burlesque, and nasal tone, in extravagant imitation of a girl they knew who had gone to New York and had come back talking with the knowing, cock-sure nasal tone of the New Yorker.
“Ah, fine, boys!” Helen said, in this burlesque tone. “Fine! Just like they give you in New York!” she said. Then turning away indifferently, she went down the steps, and across the walk towards her husband’s car, calling back in an almost hard and aggressive tone:
“Well, you can do exactly as you like! No one is going to urge you to come if you don’t want to!”
Then she got into the car and they drove swiftly off down-hill, turned the corner and vanished.
The reason, in fact, which argued in Eugene’s family’s mind against his succeeding in the work he wished to do was the very thing that should have been all in his favour. But neither he nor his family thought so. It was this: a writer, they thought, should be a wonderful, mysterious, and remote sort of person—someone they had never known, like Irvin S. Cobb. “Now, this boy,” they argued in their minds, “our son and brother, is neither wonderful, mysterious, nor remote. We know all about him, we all grew up together here, and there’s no use talking—he’s the same kind of people that we are. His father was a stone-cutter—a man who was born on a farm and had to work all his life with his hands. And five of his father’s brothers were also stone-cutters, and had to earn their living in the same way—by the sweat of their brow. And his mother is a hard-working woman who brought up a big family, runs a boarding-house and has had to scrape and save and labour all her life. Everyone in this part of the country knows her family: her brothers are respected business men in town here, and there are hundreds of her kinsfolk—farmers, storekeepers, carpenters, lumber-dealers, and the like—all through this section. Now, they’re all good, honest, decent, self-respecting people—no one can say they’re not—but there’s never been a writer in the crowd. No—and no doctors or lawyers either. Now there may have been a preacher or two—his Uncle Bascom was a preacher and a highly educated man too, always poking his nose into a book and went to Harvard, and all—yes, and now that we remember, always had queer notions like this boy—had to leave the Church, you know, for being an agnostic, and was always writing poems, and all such as that. Well, this fellow is one of the same kind—a great book-reader but with no practical business
