She explained that she had hated it less when she was in Europe, where she had at last got her year, having taken young Henry with her in spite of her husband’s strong protest. The mother and son had just returned. “I think I could stand the place perfectly well, George,” she said, “if I were quite sure I’d never have to see it again!”
“But don’t you begin to understand _yet_ what a husband you’ve got?” George cried. “Why, he’s a great man, Lena!”
Lena laughed and looked at him pityingly; but contented herself with that for argument. To her mind Dan was not made great by becoming the great figure of a city that was merely growing larger, noisier, and dirtier. She had never cared for anything but Beauty, she said; and, to her mind, as to that of the fastidious Harlan, Dan was only helping to increase hideousness; so she joined her brother-in-law in habitually referring to “Ornaby the Beautiful” as “Ornaby the Horrible.” Moreover, although she had never manifested any interest in National Avenue before its destruction began, she became almost vehement upon the subject of its merit as the razing of its old houses continued; and Harlan was again in agreement with her here.
“You and Eugene Morgan and that rascally old Sheridan and your Jew friends are doing an awful thing,” he said to Dan at a family dinner. “You’re ruining the one decent thing the city possessed—a splendid, dignified old street. It’s happening all over the country—one doesn’t need half an hour in New York to see that Fifth Avenue is ruined; but I did think we might have escaped here. I doubt if it would ever have occurred to Morgan to put up his awful sales building—with a repair shop in it!—on National Avenue, if you hadn’t done it first. Then the others thought they had to follow; and if something isn’t done to stop you fellows, the whole avenue will be nothing but a mile row of motor-car sales buildings and pneumatic tire warehouses and garages—a market!—and with hundred-foot smoke-stacks! It may reach even here to our old house and the Shelbys’; and already you’ve made the peaceful neighbourhood around _my_ house horrible. I’d like to know what grandma Savage would have said about the things you people have done to this town! Why, you’ve made National Avenue begin to look like an old pipe-smoking hag’s mouth with every other tooth missing and the rest sticking up all black in the smoke.”