“Of course. I’m not complaining—lucky to see you at all. Anyway what’s on my mind is this: why Jem looks back with such nostalgia and wants to make the history a work of piety toward the past is, no doubt, because of those old virtues—the pioneer virtues of hard work, courage, a variety of skills, a way of coping with the impossible, humor (that Scotch-Irish blood boils up into laughter as well as anger, you know). But where did it all lead? The men petered out finally because there was too little for them to get their teeth into. The women flourished because women thrive in just this atmosphere of make-do, of daily creation of life itself. Men, I believe, wither away if there is no challenge to the mind. Physical hardship creates character, Christina, and that is what we still see around us and treasure—in Ellen, in Old Pete even, in men like Orin Gregg, the old stock still clinging to a kind of frontier life in the middle of the twentieth century. But what was the culture? The Genteel Tradition with a vengeance. Who in this town reads these days? Who ever heard of Faulkner or Malamud, to say nothing of Sartre or Kierkegaard or Marcuse?”

“It’s a country village, Eben, for heaven’s sake!”

“Well, take a look at the equivalent in England or in France. I remember having a hot argument with a tobacco-seller in an English village about G. B. Shaw—years ago, of course. The missionaries did go out and find a larger air—some of them did. Some of them transplanted the Genteel Tradition and its emphasis on ‘how beautiful and interesting’ it all was, even to China! Good Christ, it’s been a thin air around here for half a century!”

“But people did things. You did, Eben. There’s nothing thin about you!”

“Maybe not, but my father, the grandson of Sophia Dole, for all his intelligence, had none of her edge, or strength of character for that matter—a farmer who spent half his life drinking and telling stories with his cronies.”

Christina looked thoughtful. “It’s a rather grim picture.”

“Well, isn’t it a bit grim that people go wild about collecting what amounts to crude peasant furniture—early American, they call it—as if it had a character? But what was its character? Crude, often actually ugly, having the virtue that someone had made do with what he had around. Some savage tribes do better!”

“The women did make beautiful quilts, Eben, and hand-woven materials.”