Evening Star Newspaper, December 8, 1929, Page 110

B THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C., DECEMBER 8, 1929. “THE DAUGHTER OF MARION HOWLAND” B Y Fannie Hurst. This Is a First- Run Stery, Fresh From the Pen of - America’sLeading Wrriter of Short Stories—Another of Miss Hurst’s - Unusual Bits of Fiction Will Ap- pear in The Star’s Magazine Next Sunday. ARION HOWLAND'S boarding house had grown under her cap- able fingers from a small, 6-roomn dwelling in an obscure part of the city to a 20-room old man- sion that had once belonged to one of the prcminent families in the city. She was a worker of the kind of indefatigability that seems to be fed by the secret springs of a mysterious vitality. The boarders used laughingly to declare that Marion Howland had some sort of a sixth sense by which she could detect that towels were lacking in Mr. Aver’s room; a washstand was leaking in Miss Van Antrip’s room; the Gadsby youngster was scuffing the parlor wood- work, or that the kitchen plumbing had de- veloped a leak. With all these earmarks of efficiency for her work, Marion Howland was far from being the conventional landlady. She was a good-look- ing, well preserved woman, who showed little of the wear and tear of her 19 years of widowhood. Many of her boarders even loyally declared that from the rear.you could scarcely tell her and her daughter Shirley apart. That, of course, was exaggeration, and Marion Howland was the first to laugh it away as such. She laughed a great deal, and her laugh was infectious. Her boarders enjoyed these strains of her good humor sounding through the hallways of the house, and as Shirley herself declared, she found her mother a better all-around companion than the majority of the younger people of her own set. And yet this “set” was the pride of Marion Howland’s life. It represented the peak of her achievement. It was the realization of one of the brightest of her ideals. Shirley Howland's “set” was onz that was planes removed from the realm of the boarding house in which she had been reared. : MAR!ON HOWLAND had steadfastly set out to keep her small daughter’s life clear of as much as possible of the environment into which stress of financial circumstance had forced her. When the little Shirley was 3 years old, Marion was already beginning carefully to see to it that her social affiliations were made outside the boarding house. The social world into which Marion had mar- ried, only to be widowed before she had had time to place her foot on the rung of social ad- vancement, was the one thing she coveted for her daughter. Marion herself had missed it, marrying from her role of saleslady into her brief period as wife of Kenneth Howland, well known society man-about-town. It was extraordinary that in all the lean, even ferocious years of her struggle as a widow, unexpectedly left penniless with a child to rear, how Marion’s congenital good nature blossomed and bloomed. Her struggle in the none too congenial atmosphere of the boarding house had left her unembittered. At 40 she was per= sonable, indesd highly attractive, and in no uncertain manner successful. Her boarding house was known as a first-class, conservative residence for first-class conservative people. Her daughter, 18 and lovely, had accomplished the miracle her mother had planned for her. Shirley moved in the first realms of the city. Her friends were the daughters of the town's wealthiest and most exclusive, and never once n her bright career as a society girl, was Shirley to feel inability to cope, in clothes at least, with the performances of her more prosperous girl friends. Inevitably, of course, there came times when the peculiarities of her environment embar- rassed, but there, fortunately again, Shirley was blessed with some of her mother's fine resiliency of spirit. She had audacity, courage and a fine, but not overemphasized pride that in many ways helped her somewhat anomalous situation. Shirley had her hearthurts, all right, her secret regrets that her home back- ground was not the home background of many of her friends, but no one was ever to know it, least of all her mother, who nevertheless sens:d it and sensed it deeply. IT was inevitable, then, as Shirley blossomed into adolescence, that from time to time there should occur in the boarding house of shifting scenes and shifting personalities, little situations that were troublesome to Marion and to Shirley alike. For instance, shockingly, it was rumored all over town that young Ham- mond Johnson, an architect, who had occupied Marion Howland’s third floor front for over a period of three years, had drowned himself of despair over his hopeless passion for the daugh- ter of his landlady, who treated him in the same aloof manner she treated all of her moth- er's boarders. Calm, courteous, polite. There had also been the rather difficult sit- uation of Otis Greer, a married man, who had boarded with his wife in the Howland house for at least five years, confessing excitedly one night, while in his cups, to a dining room filled with boarders, that he desired to divorce his wife and marry Shirley Howland. Situations such as these did not make it any easier for Marion to conduct her establishment along the lines she had laid out for herself. An alluring and grown daughter complicated mat- ters. More than that, the boarders were begin- ning to take on a resentful attitude toward the alleged snobbishness of the daughter of the bt 3. % g e MR Shirley, eighteen and lovely, had ac- complished the miracle her mother had planned for her. landlady. Marion, had it been a matter of choosing between the success of her boarding house and the necessity for Shirley to live more closely in its environment, would have sacrificed the former. It was due to her own rigid dis- cipline that Shirley had learned that her world, her mother’s choice of world for her, must lie outside the boarding house. And in the end, all of Marion’s carefully laid schemes for her daughter bore richer fruits than even she had dared to visualize. The sweet Shirley, impeccably lovely at 18, met, be- came engaged to and married, all within 10 days, a young radio magnate, who at 32, socially secure, and full of the vitality that matched Shirley’s, was already regarded as one of the important financial men of the country. VERNIGHT, Marion Howland’s boarding house became a thing of the past, that is, in so far as Marion’s proprietorship was con- cerned. Llewellyn Lewes literally sold his mother-in-law’s boarding house over her head, making, as he laughingly put it, a “fat profit.” The first year that Shirley was married, Ma- rion’s son-in-law, with a largesse character- istic of him in everything he did, settled the modest nest-egg of $1,000,000 upon her. As Marion herself was fond of explaining, it might as well have been one-tenth that amount, since her sense reeled after the first 100,000 mark had been passed. But Marion Howland, well set-up, attractive, full of energies and interests at 45, was thor- oughly capable of entering into her new estate. She bloomed with happiness in her own well- Autumn Landscape. BY ELIAS LIEBERMAN. The aging vear is done With things that move the heart; He potters on like one Who plays a weary part. In all the crackling sounds That stir the Autumn woods He knows his mortal bounds And lost beatitudes. The hopes of youth are real; They cling tenaciously; But drifting leaves reveal An old man’s apathy. being and in her daughter’'s. Her son-in-law was congenial to her. The new and dizzying environment of creature-comforts in which she found herself was ever gratifying. Also, Marion Howland had known too much of the deprivation of life not to see to it that out of her own plenty some of it poured into the empty hands of others, Marion, being mutually congenial to her daughter and son-in-law, was not permitted out of the regime of their household. The Llewellyn Lewes occupied, along with Marion Howland, a twelve-room suite on the top floor of the most exclusive family hotel in town. Yet Marion Howland was determined that with the new life of ease, her interests were not to' deteriorate. She determined to keep up her activities, and yet try as she would, there was something about the condition of being relieved from the routine of the running of the boarding house that left her with a stranded feeling. Part of her credo was to interfere as little as possible in the lives and activities of her two children. She insisted that they travel, go about, regardless of her, and refused to mingle more than casually in their social activities. One day, when the realization had settled quite definitely upon Marion that she was on her own hands, and that time was beginning to pall, she did a characteristic thing and one that ultimately was to make her, in her own way, as nationally prominent as her son-in-law. Observing one day during the absence of her son-in-law and daughter cn a European jaunt that the family hotel in which they were living was run along lines that seemed inefficient, she bought the hotel, paid for it one-third cash, and a few weeks later had established herself as proprietor. That was the beginning of the international hotel series now known as the Howland Chain, (Copyright, 1929.) Uncle Sam Defines Juices. UNCLE SAM is out to have words convey a meaning rather than to hide one, so a standard is b2ing set up for fruit juices, grape juice and orange juice. Definitions of each of these three are proposed and are awaiting approval. They are: Fruit juices are the clean, unf:rmented juices obtained from the first pressing of sound, ma- ture, fresh fruits or their pulps and correspond in name to the fruits from which they are obtained. Grape juice is the unfermented, expressed juice of clean, sound, mature grapes. It is made from a single pressing of the fruit, with or without the addition of heat, and with or without the removal of solid matter. Orange juice is the clean, unfermented juice, with or without portions of the pulp, obtained from the sound, mature fruit of the orange, by reaming or burring the cut fruit; by pressing the pulp after the removal of the peel; and by pressing the whole fruit with the subsequent removal of the oil derived fram the peel.