There was something fairly uncanny about
Fairbridge's influence upon people after they had lived there even a
few years. The influence held good, too, in the cases of men who
daily went to business or professions in New York. Even Wall Street
was no sinecure. Back they would come at night, and the terrible,
narrow maelstrom of pettiness sucked them in. All outside interest
was as naught. International affairs seemed insignificant when once
one was really in Fairbridge.

Fairbridge, although rampant when local politics were concerned, had
no regard whatever for those of the nation at large, except as they
involved Fairbridge. Fairbridge, to its own understanding, was a
nucleus, an ultimatum. It was an example of the triumph of the
infinitesimal. It saw itself through a microscope and loomed up
gigantic. Fairbridge was like an insect, born with the conviction
that it was an elephant. There was at once something ludicrous, and
magnificent, and terrible about it. It had the impressiveness of the
abnormal and prehistoric. In one sense, it _was_ prehistoric. It was
as a giant survivor of a degenerate species.

Withal, it was puzzling. People if pinned down could not say why, in
Fairbridge, the little was so monstrous, whether it depended upon
local conditions, upon the general population, or upon a few who had
an undue estimation of themselves and all connected with them. Was
Fairbridge great because of its inhabitants, or were the inhabitants
great because of Fairbridge? Who could say? And why was Fairbridge so
important that its very smallness overwhelmed that which, by the
nature of things, seemed overwhelming? Nobody knew, or rather, so
tremendous was the power of the small in the village, that nobody
inquired.

It is entirely possible that had there been any delicate gauge of
mentality, the actual swelling of the individual in his own
estimation as he neared Fairbridge after a few hours' absence, might
have been apparent. Take a broker on Wall Street, for instance, or a
lawyer who had threaded his painful way to the dim light of
understanding through the intricate mazes of the law all day, as his
train neared his loved village. From an atom that went to make up the
motive power of a great metropolis, he himself became an entirety. He
was It with a capital letter. No wonder that under the circumstances
Fairbridge had charms that allured, that people chose it for suburban
residences, that the small, ornate, new houses