Dan and his wife contribute one child to our present younger generation.
One doesn't expect the adventure to turn out very well. It doesn't. At the time Dan married he had already conceived his life-work: he is to develop an "addition" to his midwestern city. With an unsatisfactory home life, he himself develops into a mere megaphone for his real-estate business. We will not divulge his domestic or pecuniary troubles beyond this point, nor shall we speak further of the cold-hearted Harlan. What one feels, at first, about all these people, except Dan's tough-minded old grandmother and the "hickory" father of the girl next door—what one feels is, that one has had hardly any feeling whatever. What they do and say is all real enough, plausible enough; yet there is no mordancy or bite in their total effect. Nothing unexpected ever falls from their dusty lips. They never burst or blurt or blunder into any arresting actuality. All there is to their lives is on the surface: the inside, if there is an inside, is without distinction and without charm—it is devoid of interest. It neither rejoices one nor hurts one—much.
When I finished The Midlander, I asked myself what it had said to me—what its theme was. It isn't the familiar story of the discontented wife or the disillusioned husband. The girl is an uncomfortable enough little beast, so far as Mr. Tarkington has indicated her. But she really isn't "done": discontented wives are infinitely richer in the resources of misery than this shallow creature shows
