Act I
_This is the “living” room of Jerry Frost’s house. It is evening.
The room (and, by implication, the house) is small and stuffy—it’s
an awful bother to raise these old-fashioned windows; some of them
stick, and besides it’s extravagant to let in much cold air, here
in the middle of March. I can’t say much for the furniture, either.
Some of it’s instalment stuff, imitation leather with the grain
painted on as an after-effect, and some of it’s dingily,
depressingly old. That bookcase held “Ben Hur” when it was a
best-seller, and it’s now trying to digest “A Library of the
World’s Best Literature” and the “Wit and Humor of the United
States in Six Volumes.” That couch would be dangerous to sit upon
without a map showing the location of all craters, hillocks, and
thistle-patches. And three dead but shamefully unburied clocks
stare eyelessly before them from their perches around the walls._
_Those walls—God! The history of American photography hangs upon
them. Photographs of children with puffed dresses and depressing
leers, taken in the Fauntleroy nineties, of babies with toothless
mouths and idiotic eyes, of young men with the hair cuts of ’85 and
’90 and ’02, and with neckties that loop, hoist, snag, or flare in
conformity to some esoteric, antiquated standard of middle-class
dandyism. And the girls! You’d have to laugh at the girls!
Imitation Gibson girls, mostly; you can trace their histories
around the room, as each of them withered and stated. Here’s one in
the look-at-her-little-toes-aren’t-they-darling period, and here
she is later when she was a little bother of ten. Look! This is the
way she was when she was after a husband. She might be worse.
There’s a certain young charm or something, but in the next picture
you can see what five years of general housework have done to her.
You wouldn’t turn your eyes half a degree to watch her in the
street. And that was taken six years ago—now she’s thirty and
already an old woman._
