CHAPTER I

THE WARING PROBLEMS


I

With few exceptions, the incidents recorded in these pages take place in
one of the largest cities of the United States of America, and of that
portion called the Middle West,--a city once conservative and provincial,
and rather proud of these qualities; but now outgrown them, and linked by
lightning limited trains to other teeming centers of the modern world: a
city overtaken, in recent years, by the plague which has swept our
country from the Atlantic to the Pacific--Prosperity. Before its advent,
the Goodriches and Gores, the Warings, the Prestons and the Atterburys
lived leisurely lives in a sleepy quarter of shade trees and spacious
yards and muddy macadam streets, now passed away forever. Existence was
decorous, marriage an irrevocable step, wives were wives, and the
Authorized Version of the Bible was true from cover to cover. So Dr.
Gilman preached, and so they believed.

Sunday was then a day essentially different from other days--you could
tell it without looking at the calendar. The sun knew it, and changed
the quality of his light the very animals, dogs and cats and horses, knew
it: and most of all the children knew it, by Sunday school, by Dr.
Gilman's sermon, by a dizzy afternoon connected in some of their minds
with ceramics and a lack of exercise; by a cold tea, and by church bells.
You were not allowed to forget it for one instant. The city suddenly
became full of churches, as though they had magically been let down from