Second Empire
                                                                                                                                                           Storm coming
                                                                                                                                                           Northern Vermont
So you already knew what the title of today's post would be.  Hello.

But did you know that the books we were discussing yesterday, all written by women in the 1950s, had to do with secrets?  Yes.

The secret in Elizabeth Enright's Gone-Away Lake (1957) is the existence of the summer resort of old houses the children have discovered while exploring a swamp where a now-forgotten lake used to be.
In Cornelia Meig's Wild Geese Flying (1957), the secret has to do with why the townspeople hate Dick Milton's family when they come to live in the old house in Vermont that Dick's mother has inherited.
And in Mary Norton's The Borrowers (1953), the secret is the reason why tiny Arrietty can never go upstairs into the old house where the humans live.

And by the way, Mary Norton (December 10, 1903 - August 29, 1992) practically deserves to count as a 1904 person of interest, as I think you'll agree.  So close.

In any event, secrets are a compelling element of these influential books, in addition to the large role old houses play in each of them.  And I believe one could argue that the anxiety of the post-War era felt by these three women authors was a major contributing factor in the formulation of the respective plots.  But as it is Sunday and I have a busy day ahead of me and you being such a quick study and all, I shall not go into further detail on this matter except to say, "Now you know."

After all, there were secrets in 1904.  The overriding secret of the time being more of a nagging suspicion that the way things were could not be sustained, and that the dizzy-making fin de siecle euphoria everyone was still feeling (even into the new century) was bound to come to an end and probably not in an especially pleasant fashion.  Then World War I came along.

Today, however, it is the secret itself that is coming to an end, and no, I don't mean that popular book and video.    As you might imagine, this secret really goes all the way back to 1904, in the sense that one more time the realization is dawning that the way things are simply can't continue.  Which of course is not to say that the people with money and power to lose won't try.  

I'll give you a hint.  Andrew Mellon said, of the last great Depression when they allowed the banks to close, that a depression was the way money got redistributed -- back to the people it belonged to.  Get it?  The really rich didn't get poor in the Great Depression; the poor just got really poor.  Then there was an effort to help those poor for a while, to keep up appearances, and then there was a war which was an opportunity for the rich to get richer again so prosperity was declared.  Then the rich started to worry that the poor might be getting uppity and getting ideas, and something had to be done, so they started banging the pans of moral decay and shouting about the threat to the American Family and Way of Life.  Moral decay being worse than tooth decay and no one being in favor of attacking innocent families much less a Way of Life, whatever that might be, you can see how things could get out of hand pretty quickly.  Everyone wound up to a fever pitch.  Not even another war seemed to help.  Or the war after that one.  Or the next one.
 
So, hello, no wonder people get anxious after a war.  And that's the secret.  I told you it was an old one.