“That’s about it, my boy,” his father agreed “I sometimes think we need just one more organization—­a society that would never meet, but between the meetings of all the other societies would actually get done the things they talk about and pass resolutions about and then go off and forget until the next meeting.”

“Well, dad, what I want to find out,” J.W. said, as he started off with Mr. Drury to the post office, “is where the church heads in.  Mr. Drury is sure it has a big responsibility, and maybe it has.  But what is it willing to do and able to do, and what will the town let it do?  It seems to me that is the question.”

J.W. heard his father’s voice echoing after him up the street, “Sure, that is the question,” and Mr. Drury added, “Three questions in one.”

J.W. found himself taking notice in a way he had not done before through all his years in Delafield.  As might be expected, he had come home from college with new ideas and new standards.  The town looked rather more sordid and commonplace than was his boy’s remembrance of it.  Of late it had taken to growing, and a large part of its development had come during his college years.  So he must needs learn his own town all over again.

Cherishing his young college graduate’s vague new enthusiasm for a better world, he had little sympathy with much that Delafield opinion acclaimed as progress.

The Delafield Daily Dispatch carried at its masthead every afternoon one or more of such slogans as these:  “Be a Delafield Booster,” “Boost for more Industries,” “Put Delafield on the Map,” “Double Delafield in Half a Decade,” “Delafield, the Darling of Destiny,” “Watch Delafield Grow, but Don’t Stop Boosting to Rubber.”

These were taken by many citizens as a sort of business gospel; any “theorist” who ventured to question the wisdom of bringing more people to town, whether the town’s business could give them all a decent living or not, was told to sell his hammer and buy a horn.  J.W. said nothing; he was too young and too recent a comer into the town’s business life.  But he could not work up any zeal for this form of town “loyalty.”

A big cannery had been built down near the river, where truck gardens flourished, and there was a new furniture factory at the edge of the freight yards.  Hereabouts a lot of supremely ugly flats had gone up, two families to each floor and three stories high; and in J.W.’s eyes the rubbish and disorder and generally slattern appearance of the region was no great addition to Delafield’s attractions.

Still more did the tumbledown shacks in the neighborhood of the cannery offend the eyes and, to be frank, the ears and nose as well.  It was a forlorn-looking lot of hovels, occupied by listless, frowsy adults and noisy children.  Here existence seemed to be a grim caricature of life; the children, the only symbol of abundance to be seen, continued to be grotesque in their very dirt.  What clothes they had were second or third-hand garments too large for them, which they seemed to be perpetually in danger of losing altogether.