The House of Toys

The Plot

The Young Man Everybody Believes In

David Quentin is twenty seven, an architect, and universally liked. Men make him their confidant. Older women visit his rooms and take an interest in his wardrobe. Younger ones flirt with him because they know he'll never take advantage. He's been alone in the world since he was ten, with a guardian trust company for a family, and he's spent the years since collecting friends to fill the gap.

Everyone agrees that Davy Quentin is going to do big things one of these days. What nobody notices is that believing in him has quietly replaced helping him. They save their business and their introductions for young men like Dick Holden, who has less talent and considerably more hustle, and they assume David's brilliant career has already launched itself.

It hasn't. He's making about nine hundred a year, spending every cent of it, and owes more than five hundred. He wears his clothes well, keeps his club membership, and borrows as easily as he once lent. The book tells you outright, before the story even starts, that there's a witch in it whose name is Circumstance, and that she gave this young man exactly one gift, knowing perfectly well that one wouldn't be enough.

Shirley

He meets her at a friend's dinner party and forgets to eat the meal. She's lovely, she laughs beautifully, and she tells him she's poor too, a working girl on her vacation, expensive presents from a rich aunt notwithstanding. Within two weeks they're engaged, sitting on a sunny slope in October with the whole thing settled: they'll wait six months, they'll start small, they'll live on whatever there is and hold their heads up as if it were millions.

Their hostess, who arranged the introduction, spends those two weeks increasingly uneasy. She warns Shirley that David's too nice a boy to be hurt. She doesn't say the other thing out loud, the question actually turning over in her mind, which is whether David can safely be entrusted to Shirley.

Shirley's sister Maizie tries too, carefully, badly, in a conversation that leaves her ashamed of herself. Shirley's a dear, she says, and everyone has always done things for her and saved her from things, and she's never had to face a real trial in her life. If one came, it would be a very real trial indeed. David laughs and promises what Maizie asks: that if the day ever comes when he sees his wife through a different pair of spectacles, he won't judge her too harshly.

They're married in May, in a storm, and in the morning the sun is out and everything seems fine.

The Budget

They make one, carefully, the way lovers do. Then they go apartment hunting and Shirley's spirits fall a little further with every shabby place they see, and when a friend mentions something pretty that costs fifteen dollars a month more than they can afford, David tells himself they're only going to look at it.

That's the pattern, and once you see it you can't unsee it. Every single item goes a little past the line, because the disappointment on Shirley's face when she can't have something is more than he can stand. It works for a while. It's a boom year, the city's growing, architects are in demand. They have a first anniversary dinner with all the wedding silver out, and she curls up on his knee afterward and says being poor isn't so bad after all.

Then the baby comes, and the panic comes with him, and the building stops everywhere at once.

The Sketches Nobody Wants

David starts eating lunch at a dairy counter and stops telling Shirley about it. He walks to the office in all weather, gives up his books, wears an overcoat with shiny spots, and sits at a desk with nothing on it. A contractor who owes him five hundred dollars goes bankrupt on the same day the doctor's bill arrives.

And at night, after she's gone to bed, he sits at his easel until two or three in the morning and does the best work of his life. Cathedrals, chapels, altars, rood screens, things he loves so much it frightens him a little. He shows them to Shirley, who glances and says they're very pretty and wonders whether anyone will ever pay him to build one.

Then a wealthy parish announces a competition for a new church, and David, who has never in his life known how to work an angle, walks in the front door and asks to submit plans. He spends two months on it. He believes, with everything he has left, that the committee are honorable men who will see what's in front of them.

Dick Holden, who is also competing with a set of plans he freely admits are inferior, comes by the office to explain how these things actually get decided.

What It Costs

What happens next takes the last of David's faith in himself, and the fight it sets off in that apartment ends with a word from Shirley that neither of them can take back. In the morning she decides she's been good for him, that he only needed bracing up, and that perhaps she'd better take the reins for a while. Her first act is to write to her rich aunt.

David's first act is to walk into his friend's bank and ask, as lightly as he can manage, whether anyone happens to know of a job with a living salary attached. Preferably not in his own line.

He gets one, drafting machine parts for a small manufacturing firm. His new employer is a roly-poly little man with red whiskers, an absurd pug nose and an office that runs on a principle nobody has quite explained to David yet, which is that half the people working there were rescued from something. The firm is profitable anyway. Its owner finds time to ask his employees about their mothers and their lungs and their babies, and he is very, very interested in what's wrong with his new draftsman.

Meanwhile Aunt Clara arrives with a proposal, a taxicab, and opinions about everything from the price of coffee to the number of dresses a baby requires. She'll take Shirley and the boy to live with her until David gets on his feet. Shirley thinks it's the only sensible thing. David asks her, almost begging, to stay.

So he puts them on a train, walks home the long way, spends the rest of the day tearing up every sketch he ever made, and discovers he cannot make his hands destroy the church plans. He wraps those carefully and packs them for storage with everything else.

What he has left is an emptied apartment, a job he doesn't want, a debt he can't clear, and a quiet bookkeeper at the next desk who brings too much lunch on purpose.

The book warned you about the sunflower who wouldn't thrive in the shade. It also mentioned, in the same breath, a white iris.

About the Author: Henry Russell Miller

A Minister's Son in Pittsburgh

Henry Russell Miller was born in Ohio in 1880, the son of a Presbyterian clergyman who also edited the church's publications in Pittsburgh. The family moved to Allegheny City while he was small, and he grew up in the city's grammar schools with the steel mills for scenery.

He studied law at the University of Pittsburgh and was admitted to the Allegheny County bar in 1902. He opened his own practice immediately and built a solid general civil career, which he never gave up.

The Novels

The writing happened alongside the law. His first novel arrived in 1910, a moral tale about a young man's character being tested in the grubbier corners of Pittsburgh politics, and it did well enough to be syndicated in newspapers from Spokane to small towns in upstate New York. A second political novel followed in 1911, then a big steel industry novel in 1913 about a man's climb to wealth and power, which Hollywood picked up and filmed twice under considerably racier titles than Miller had given it.

This one came in 1914, published by Bobbs-Merrill in Indianapolis, and it's the odd one out. No politics, no mills, no empire building. Just two young people and a monthly budget.

The War and After

Miller served with the field service division of the YMCA and spent two years in France during the First World War. He came home and wrote a short history of the First Division, and then, essentially, stopped writing fiction.

Instead he went into printing. He managed the Crescent Press of Pittsburgh and eventually owned it, running a business that specialized in direct mailers and catalogs while occasionally producing something more permanent, including a volume of old Pittsburgh photographs and a war diary by one of the Mellons. He also directed an advertising firm and stayed active in the Chamber of Commerce and the Kiwanis Club.

He died in 1955 at seventy five, survived by two brothers and his daughter Helen Jean.

Fun Facts About the Book

It Opens by Telling You It Isn't a Fairy Tale

The first paragraph introduces a witch named Circumstance with a train of goblins behind her, several good fairies, a young man with one gift too few, and a girl described as a sunflower. It then mentions a second girl who is an iris, breaks off, and says that's the story. It's a framing device Miller keeps returning to throughout, and it does something clever: it lets him say out loud that the villain of this book is not a person.

The Chapter Titles Are Part of the Joke

They run from The Plans through The Witch, Good Fairies, Spells, Sanctuary, Certain Plots, The Witch Laughs and finally The Happy Ending. A domestic novel about rent and overdue notes, filed under fairy tale headings. Whether the last title is sincere is a question the book makes you carry all the way there.

The Author Kept His Day Job

Miller was a practicing attorney the entire time he was writing, which may explain the unusual patience of the book's bookkeeping. Very few novels of this era are this specific about what things cost, who owes whom, and how a note at a friendly bank gets renewed one more time.

It Was Filmed as a Silent in 1920

An American Film Company production directed by George L. Cox, distributed by Pathé Exchange, running about an hour. Seena Owen played Shirley, Pell Trenton played David, and Helen Jerome Eddy played Esther Summers. Owen was a genuine name at the time, having appeared in D. W. Griffith's enormous 1916 production Intolerance.

The Panic Is Real

The economic collapse that hits the Quentins halfway through isn't invented. Miller was writing about a crash his readers had lived through, and the details ring true down to the wise statesmen and newspapers confidently explaining that the slump is temporary and trivial.

The Original Had a Frontispiece

The first edition carried a single illustration by Frank Snapp. It's missing from most surviving digital copies, which means modern readers are seeing the book stripped down to the prose.

The Flowers Are Doing Real Work

Sunflowers need direct sun and don't do well in shade. Irises are shade tolerant and come in white. Miller sets up that comparison in the first page and never explains it again, trusting you to remember it when it matters.

Themes

Poverty Is Not the Same Experience for Two People

Both David and Shirley are poor. He experiences it as a problem to be solved with work and endurance. She experiences it as a humiliation and a deprivation of things she considers hers by right. The book is remarkably clear eyed that these are not the same condition even inside the same apartment, and that neither person can quite believe the other is reacting sanely.

Being Loved and Being Useful

David's whole idea of love is service. He wants someone to provide for, to shield, to carry things for. What the book slowly, mercilessly examines is what happens to a marriage built on that foundation when the man can no longer provide, and whether the love that came with the providing was ever separable from it.

Talent Without Push

David does better work than anyone around him and gets nothing for it, because the commissions go to whoever knows how to work the committee. Miller doesn't romanticize this. Dick Holden isn't a villain, he's just a man who plays the game everyone plays, and he says so honestly. The question the book poses is not whether the game is fair but what a man who can't play it is supposed to do with his life.

Protecting Someone Is Also Deciding Something For Them

Every time David hides a bill, a lost commission or a skipped meal from Shirley, he tells himself he's being kind. He's also making her decisions impossible to make, and removing any chance she has of rising to something. When she finds out how much he kept from her, her first reaction is genuine tenderness. Her second is to go on exactly as before.

Kindness as an Organizing Principle

The manufacturing firm in the second half is quietly the most radical thing in the book. It's a profitable business staffed largely with people nobody else would hire: a woman worked half to death in a department store, a collector with bad lungs, a foreman with a drinking problem, a man just out of the penitentiary. Miller presents this without preaching, mostly through the astonishment of a man who arrives assuming his own job is charity.

Nobody Here Is a Villain

That's the hardest part. Shirley isn't wicked, she's a young woman who was petted into helplessness by everyone who loved her, told all her life that things would be handled for her. David isn't weak, exactly, he's generous and proud in the wrong proportions. The witch does her damage through people who mean each other no harm at all, which is why the book still stings.

The Book's Legacy

This one has largely slipped out of view, which is a fair reflection of Miller's career as a whole. He was a regional novelist with a national publisher and a comfortable reputation in his own decade, and then he put down the pen and became a printer, and the books went quiet.

But the novel has kept a small, oddly devoted readership, and the reason is the subject matter. Almost nobody was writing this in 1914. The literature of the period wanted mills and railroads and tycoons and grand moral struggles over the shape of American capitalism, which is what Miller himself had been writing right up until this point. Here he turned the same attention onto a young couple's monthly expenses and found a story just as brutal.

It sits in the lineage that runs through Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson and eventually Richard Yates: the American domestic novel where the antagonist is the household ledger and the battlefield is a rented apartment. What sets Miller's version apart is the tenderness. He clearly likes both of these people. He gives Shirley her charm and her fear and her honest early bravery before he lets the pressure work on her, and he lets David be exasperating as well as sympathetic.

Contemporary reviewers singled out two things: the slow believable awakening of a man who's been living in a fool's paradise, and the portrait of a wife whose horizon genuinely doesn't extend past pretty clothes and a good time, drawn without contempt. Both still hold up.

Read it if you've ever watched two decent people grind each other down over money, or if you want to see how completely modern a novel from 1914 can be when it decides to look at marriage honestly. The fairy tale wrapping is a soft covering over something quite hard.