These young aristocrats were, for the most part, students from the town itself, from La Chance’s “best families,” who through parental tyranny or temporary financial depression were not allowed to go East to a well-known college with a sizable matriculation fee, but were forced to endure four years of the promiscuous, swarming, gratuitous education of the State University.  All these august victims of family despotism associated as little as possible with the common rabble of their fellow-students, and accepted invitations only from such faculty families as were recognized by the inner circle of the town society.

The Marshalls were not among this select circle.  Indeed, no faculty family was farther from it.  Every detail of the Marshalls’ life was in contradiction not only to the standards and ideals of the exclusive “town set,” but to those of their own colleagues.  They did not live in the right part of town.  They did not live in the right sort of a house.  They did not live in the right sort of a way.  And consequently, although no family had more visitors, they were not the right sort of visitors.

This was, of course, not apparent to the children for a good many years.  Home was home, as it is to children.  It did not seem strange to them that instead of living in a small rented house on a closely built-up street near the campus in the section of the city occupied by the other faculty families, they lived in a rambling, large-roomed old farmhouse with five acres of land around it, on the edge of the West Side.  They did not know how heartily this land-owning stability was condemned as folly by the rent-paying professors, perching on the bough with calculated impermanence so that they might be free to accept at any moment the always anticipated call to a larger salary.  They did not know, not even Sylvia, for many years, that the West Side was the quite unfashionable part of town.  It did not seem strange to them to see their father sweeping his third-floor study with his own hands, and they were quite used to a family routine which included housework for every one of them.  Indeed, a certain amount of this was part of the family fun.  “Come on, folks!” Professor Marshall would call, rising up from the breakfast table, “Tuesday—­day to clean the living-room—­all hands turn to!” In a gay helter-skelter all hands turned to.  The lighter furniture was put out on the porch.  Professor Marshall, joking and laughing, donned a loose linen overall suit to protect his “University clothes,” and cleaned the bare floor with a big oiled mop; Mrs. Marshall, silent and swift, looked after mirrors, windows, the tops of bookcases, things hard for children to reach; Sylvia flourished a duster; and Judith and Lawrence out on the porch, each armed with a whisk-broom, brushed and whacked at the chairs and sofas.  There were no rugs to shake, and it took but an instant to set things back in their places in the clean-smelling, dustless room.