the courage to drape upon horsehair sofas; they painted owls and
daisies and sunflowers and sumac and cat-tails and peacock feathers
upon tambourines. They hung Chinese umbrellas of paper to the
chandeliers; they nailed paper fans to the walls. They "studied"
painting on china, these girls; they sang Tosti's new songs; they
sometimes still practiced the old, genteel habit of lady-fainting, and
were most charming of all when they drove forth, three or four in a
basket phaeton, on a spring morning.

Croquet and the mildest archery ever known were the sports of people
still young and active enough for so much exertion; middle-age played
euchre. There was a theatre, next door to the Amberson Hotel, and
when Edwin Booth came for a night, everybody who could afford to buy a
ticket was there, and all the "hacks" in town were hired. "The Black
Crook" also filled the theatre, but the audience then was almost
entirely of men who looked uneasy as they left for home when the final
curtain fell upon the shocking girls dressed as fairies. But the
theatre did not often do so well; the people of the town were still
too thrifty.

They were thrifty because they were the sons or grandsons of the
"early settlers," who had opened the wilderness and had reached it
from the East and the South with wagons and axes and guns, but with no
money at all. The pioneers were thrifty or they would have perished:
they had to store away food for the winter, or goods to trade for
food, and they often feared they had not stored enough--they left
traces of that fear in their sons and grandsons. In the minds of most
of these, indeed, their thrift was next to their religion: to save,
even for the sake of saving, was their earliest lesson and discipline.
No matter how prosperous they were, they could not spend money either