Not much of anything happens, you may think; well, perhaps not; but you will not be able to leave the Prestons until the last page has been turned. You will laugh unnumbered times as you turn the pages; you will be touched more than once as you read. Quite unreasonably, no doubt, you will fall in love with them as a family, from Aunt Maria to Piker, the dog. They are so much--you.
It is quite impossible to do much more with a book like _The Prestons_ than to convey the nature of the story and the character of its telling. It is related by Mrs. Preston and it starts with her exploration of the house on a summer morning. She comes first upon the dog Piker. Piker is lying on a silk wrap of Edith’s. “He is a long dog, modeled after the graceful proportions of a barrel. At every corner nobby legs are put on, dachshund fashion. His sparse yellow bristles are always coming out all over everything.... His tail is long and thick and makes a noise like a policeman’s club when he raps it on the floor.”
On the piazza were lemonade glasses, “some of them left on the floor where they could quite easily be stepped upon.” Edith’s friends. The mother takes them to the kitchen, bright and spotless, Seraphy’s domain. In the library lying on the floor is Jimmie’s notebook containing his observations, as a naturalist, on guinea pigs. They read:
“3 P. M.--Running around cage (I poked them with a stick).
“Note: The habits of guinea pigs is monotonous.”
Whereupon “I saw,” records Jimmie’s mother, “by this notebook that Jimmie had again been misled by one of those glittering books by naturalists where all the high points of a year’s study are compressed into one short article. He still touchingly believes the things he reads in books.”
She passes on. “Now my eyes lit upon an ashtray. In it were the ashes of a cigar and of three cigarettes. I had gone to bed leaving Osborn and his father in the library. Osborn is my oldest son, who is going to college next year. I stood and smiled over this telltale tray. Osborn and his father were smoking together and Henry was apparently keeping from my idealistic nature the sad fact that my son smoked.”
She wonders if her sister, Maria, knows that Osborn smokes. Maria believes that “almost everything can be secured by two mysterious processes. One is known as Nipping Things in the Bud and the other is Taking Steps.” And having straightened up the house, the mother sits out in the fresh morning air musing until various sounds denote the beginning of the family’s day and the necessity of getting ready for breakfast.