I shall be a little more intelligible, perhaps, if I tell you briefly who they were.  The father, David March, and Eveline, his wife, were New Englanders.  They both came, as a matter of fact, from within ten miles of Glastonbury, Connecticut, though they didn’t discover this fact until after they’d met a number of times in the social and religious activities of the Moody Institute.  The lives of both had been woven in the somber colors of Evangelical religion.  With him this ran close to fanaticism and served as an outlet for a very intense emotional life.  She was not highly energized enough to go to extremes in anything, but she acquiesced in all his beliefs and practises, made him in short, a perfectly dutiful wife according to the Miltonian precept, “He for God only, she for God in him.”

Back in New England she probably would not have married him for she was a cut or more above him socially, the played-out end of a very fine line, as her beautiful speech would have made evident to any sensitive ear.  But in Chicago, the disheveled, terrifying Chicago of the roaring eighties, to all intents and purposes alone, clinging precariously to a school-teacher’s job which she had no special equipment for, she put up only the weakest resistance to David March’s determination that she should be his wife.

He was a skilled artisan, a stringer and chipper in a piano factory (chipping, if you care to be told, is the tuning a piano gets before its action is put in).  One would hardly have predicted then, considering the man’s energy and intelligence, that he would remain just that, go on working at the same bench for thirty-five years.  But, as I have said, his energy found its main outlet in emotional religion.

Their first child, born in 1886, was a girl whom they named Sarah.  Anthony came two years later and for twelve years there were no more.  Then came the late baby, whom they appropriately named Benjamin and allowed a somewhat milder bringing up than the iron rule the elder ones had been subjected to.

It was the dearest wish of David’s life to make a preacher of Anthony and he must have got by way of answers to his prayers, signs which reconciled him to the sheer impossibility of this project.  The boy’s passion for music manifested itself very early and with this David compromised by training him for the higher reaches of his own craft.  He got employment for Anthony in the piano factory for a year or two after his graduation from high school and then sent him on for a liberal two years in a school in Boston where the best possible instruction in piano tuning was to be had.

Sarah was half-way through high school when her brother Benjamin was born and for two years after she graduated, her mother’s ill health, the familiar breakdown of the middle forties, kept her at home.  Then she defied her father and took a job in a down-town office.  What he objected to, of course, was not her going to work but the use she made of the independence with which self-support provided her.  The quarrel never came to a real break though often enough it looked like doing so, and except for the brief period of her marriage Sarah always lived at home.