The first had grown too
tight under the arms (Mrs. Brewster's arms); the second had faded.
Now don't gather from this that Mrs. Brewster was an ample, pie-baking,
ginghamed old soul who wore black silk and a crushed-looking hat with a
palsied rose atop it. Nor that Hosea C. Brewster was spectacled and
slippered. Not at all. The Hosea C. Brewsters, of Winnebago, Wisconsin,
were the people you've met on the veranda of the Moana Hotel at
Honolulu, or at the top of Pike's Peak, or peering into the restless
heart of Vesuvius. They were the prosperous Middle-Western type of
citizen who runs down to Chicago to see the new plays and buy a hat, and
to order a dozen Wedgwood salad plates at Field's.
Mrs. Brewster knew about Dunsany and Georgette and alligator pears; and
Hosea Brewster was in the habit of dropping around to the Elks' Club, up
above Schirmer's furniture store on Elm Street, at about five in the
afternoon on his way home from the cold-storage plant. The Brewster
house was honeycombed with sleeping porches and sun parlours and linen
closets, and laundry chutes and vegetable bins and electric surprises
as well-to-do Middle Western home is likely to be.
That home had long ago grown too large for the two of them--physically,
that is. But as the big frame house had expanded, so had
they--intolerance and understanding humanness--until now, as you talked
with them, you felt that there was room and to spare of sun-filled
mental chambers, and shelves well stored with experience, and pantries
and bins and closets for all your worries and confidences.
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