prompt:
Chapter: IRENE did not leave her mother in any illusion concerning her cousin
Will and herself.  She said they had all been as nice to her as they
could be, and when Mrs. Lapham hinted at what had been in her
thoughts,--or her hopes, rather,--Irene severely snubbed the notion.
She said that he was as good as engaged to a girl out there, and that
he had never dreamt of her.  Her mother wondered at her severity; in
these few months the girl had toughened and hardened; she had lost all
her babyish dependence and pliability; she was like iron; and here and
there she was sharpened to a cutting edge.  It had been a life and
death struggle with her; she had conquered, but she had also
necessarily lost much.  Perhaps what she had lost was not worth
keeping; but at any rate she had lost it.

She required from her mother a strict and accurate account of her
father's affairs, so far as Mrs Lapham knew them; and she showed a
business-like quickness in comprehending them that Penelope had never
pretended to.  With her sister she ignored the past as completely as it
was possible to do; and she treated both Corey and Penelope with the
justice which their innocence of voluntary offence deserved.  It was a
difficult part, and she kept away from them as much as she could.  She
had been easily excused, on a plea of fatigue from her journey, when
Mr. and Mrs. Corey had called the day after her arrival, and Mrs.
Lapham being still unwell, Penelope received them alone.

The girl had instinctively judged best that they should know the worst
at once, and she let them have the full brunt of the drawing-room,
while she was screwing her courage up to come down and see them.  She
was afterwards--months afterwards--able to report to Corey that when
she entered the room his father was sitting with his hat on his knees,
a little tilted away from the Emancipation group, as if he expected the
Lincoln to hit him, with that lifted hand of benediction; and that Mrs.
Corey looked as if she were not sure but the Eagle pecked.  But for the
time being Penelope was as nearly crazed as might be by the
complications of her position, and received her visitors with a piteous
distraction which could not fail of touching Bromfield Corey's
Italianised sympatheticism.  He was very polite and tender with her at
first, and ended by making a joke with her, to which Penelope
responded, in her sort.  He said he hoped they parted friends, if not
quite acquaintances; and she said she hoped they would be able to
recognise each other if they ever met again.

"That is what I meant by her pertness," said Mrs Corey, when they were
driving away.

"Was it very pert?" he queried.  "The child had to answer something."

"I would much rather she had answered nothing, under the
circumstances," said Mrs. Corey.  "However!" she added hopelessly.
"Oh, she's a merry little grig, you can see that, and there's no harm
in her.  I can understand a little why a formal fellow like Tom should
be taken with her.  She hasn't the least reverence, I suppose, and
joked with the young man from the beginning.  You must remember, Anna,
that there was a time when you liked my joking."

"It was a very different thing!"

"But that drawing-room," pursued Corey; "really, I don't see how Tom
stands that.  Anna, a terrible thought occurs to me! Fancy Tom being
married in front of that group, with a floral horse-shoe in tuberoses
coming down on either side of it!"

"Bromfield!" cried his wife, "you are unmerciful."

"No, no, my dear," he argued; "merely imaginative.  And I can even
imagine that little thing finding Tom just the least bit slow, at
times, if it were not for his goodness.  Tom is so kind that I'm
convinced he sometimes feels your joke in his heart when his head isn't
quite clear about it.  Well, we will not despond, my dear."

"Your father seemed actually to like her," Mrs. Corey reported to her
daughters, very much shaken in her own prejudices by the fact.  If the
girl were not so offensive to his fastidiousness, there might be some
hope that she was not so offensive as Mrs. Corey had thought.  "I
wonder how she will strike YOU," she concluded, looking from one
daughter to another, as if trying to decide which of them would like
Penelope least.

Irene's return and the visit of the Coreys formed a distraction for the
Laphams in which their impending troubles seemed to hang further aloof;
but it was only one of those reliefs which mark the course of
adversity, and it was not one of the cheerful reliefs.  At any other
time, either incident would have been an anxiety and care for Mrs.
Lapham which she would have found hard to bear; but now she almost
welcomed them.  At the end of three days Lapham returned, and his wife
met him as if nothing unusual had marked their parting; she reserved
her atonement for a fitter time; he would know now from the way she
acted that she felt all right towards him.  He took very little note of
her manner, but met his family with an austere quiet that puzzled her,
and a sort of pensive dignity that refined his rudeness to an effect
that sometimes comes to such natures after long sickness, when the
animal strength has been taxed and lowered.  He sat silent with her at
the table after their girls had left them alone, and seeing that he did
not mean to speak, she began to explain why Irene had come home, and to
praise her.

"Yes, she done right," said Lapham.  "It was time for her to come," he
added gently.

Then he was silent again, and his wife told him of Corey's having been
there, and of his father's and mother's calling.  "I guess Pen's
concluded to make it up," she said.

"Well, we'll see about that," said Lapham; and now she could no longer
forbear to ask him about his affairs.

"I don't know as I've got any right to know anything about it," she
said humbly, with remote allusion to her treatment of him.  "But I
can't help wanting to know.  How ARE things going, Si?"

"Bad," he said, pushing his plate from him, and tilting himself back in
his chair.  "Or they ain't going at all.  They've stopped."

"What do you mean, Si?" she persisted, tenderly.

"I've got to the end of my string.  To-morrow I shall call a meeting of
my creditors, and put myself in their hands.  If there's enough left to
satisfy them, I'm satisfied." His voice dropped in his throat; he
swallowed once or twice, and then did not speak.

"Do you mean that it's all over with you?" she asked fearfully.

He bowed his big head, wrinkled and grizzled; and after awhile he said,
"It's hard to realise it; but I guess there ain't any doubt about it."
He drew a long breath, and then he explained to her about the West
Virginia people, and how he had got an extension of the first time they
had given him, and had got a man to go up to Lapham with him and look
at the works,--a man that had turned up in New York, and wanted to put
money in the business.  His money would have enabled Lapham to close
with the West Virginians.  "The devil was in it, right straight along,"
said Lapham.  "All I had to do was to keep quiet about that other
company.  It was Rogers and his property right over again.  He liked
the look of things, and he wanted to go into the business, and he had
the money--plenty; it would have saved me with those West Virginia
folks.  But I had to tell him how I stood.  I had to tell him all about
it, and what I wanted to do.  He began to back water in a minute, and
the next morning I saw that it was up with him.  He's gone back to New
York.  I've lost my last chance.  Now all I've got to do is to save the
pieces."

"Will--will--everything go?" she asked.

"I can't tell, yet.  But they shall have a chance at everything--every
dollar, every cent.  I'm sorry for you, Persis--and the girls."

"Oh, don't talk of US!" She was trying to realise that the simple, rude
soul to which her heart clove in her youth, but which she had put to
such cruel proof, with her unsparing conscience and her unsparing
tongue, had been equal to its ordeals, and had come out unscathed and
unstained.  He was able in his talk to make so little of them; he
hardly seemed to see what they were; he was apparently not proud of
them, and certainly not glad; if they were victories of any sort, he
bore them with the patience of defeat.  His wife wished to praise him,
but she did not know how; so she offered him a little reproach, in
which alone she touched the cause of her behaviour at parting.
"Silas," she asked, after a long gaze at him, "why didn't you tell me
you had Jim Millon's girl there?"

"I didn't suppose you'd like it, Persis," he answered.  "I did intend
to tell you at first, but then I put--I put it off.  I thought you'd
come round some day, and find it out for yourself."

"I'm punished," said his wife, "for not taking enough interest in your
business to even come near it.  If we're brought back to the day of
small things, I guess it's a lesson for me, Silas."

"Oh, I don't know about the lesson," he said wearily.

That night she showed him the anonymous scrawl which had kindled her
fury against him.  He turned it listlessly over in his hand.  "I guess
I know who it's from," he said, giving it back to her, "and I guess you
do too, Persis."

"But how--how could he----"

"Mebbe he believed it," said Lapham, with patience that cut her more
keenly than any reproach.  "YOU did."

Perhaps because the process of his ruin had been so gradual, perhaps
because the excitement of preceding events had exhausted their capacity
for emotion, the actual consummation of his bankruptcy brought a
relief, a repose to Lapham and his family, rather than a fresh
sensation of calamity.  In the shadow of his disaster they returned to
something like their old, united life; they were at least all together
again; and it will be intelligible to those whom life has blessed with
vicissitude, that Lapham should come home the evening after he had
given up everything, to his creditors, and should sit down to his
supper so cheerful that Penelope could joke him in the old way, and
tell him that she thought from his looks they had concluded to pay him
a hundred cents on every dollar he owed them.

As James Bellingham had taken so much interest in his troubles from the
first, Lapham thought he ought to tell him, before taking the final
step, just how things stood with him, and what he meant to do.
Bellingham made some futile inquiries about his negotiations with the
West Virginians, and Lapham told him they had come to nothing.  He
spoke of the New York man, and the chance that he might have sold out
half his business to him.  "But, of course, I had to let him know how
it was about those fellows."

"Of course," said Bellingham, not seeing till afterwards the full
significance of Lapham's action.

Lapham said nothing about Rogers and the Englishmen.  He believed that
he had acted right in that matter, and he was satisfied; but he did not
care to have Bellingham, or anybody, perhaps, think he had been a fool.

All those who were concerned in his affairs said he behaved well, and
even more than well, when it came to the worst.  The prudence, the good
sense, which he had shown in the first years of his success, and of
which his great prosperity seemed to have bereft him, came back, and
these qualities, used in his own behalf, commended him as much to his
creditors as the anxiety he showed that no one should suffer by him;
this even made some of them doubtful of his sincerity.  They gave him
time, and there would have been no trouble in his resuming on the old
basis, if the ground had not been cut from under him by the competition
of the West Virginia company.  He saw himself that it was useless to
try to go on in the old way, and he preferred to go back and begin the
world anew where he had first begun it, in the hills at Lapham.  He put
the house at Nankeen Square, with everything else he had, into the
payment of his debts, and Mrs. Lapham found it easier to leave it for
the old farmstead in Vermont than it would have been to go from that
home of many years to the new house on the water side of Beacon.  This
thing and that is embittered to us, so that we may be willing to
relinquish it; the world, life itself, is embittered to most of us, so
that we are glad to have done with them at last; and this home was
haunted with such memories to each of those who abandoned it that to go
was less exile than escape.  Mrs. Lapham could not look into Irene's
room without seeing the girl there before her glass, tearing the poor
little keep-sakes of her hapless fancy from their hiding-places to take
them and fling them in passionate renunciation upon her sister; she
could not come into the sitting-room, where her little ones had grown
up, without starting at the thought of her husband sitting so many
weary nights at his desk there, trying to fight his way back to hope
out of the ruin into which he was slipping.  When she remembered that
night when Rogers came, she hated the place.  Irene accepted her
release from the house eagerly, and was glad to go before and prepare
for the family at Lapham.  Penelope was always ashamed of her
engagement there; it must seem better somewhere else and she was glad
to go too.  No one but Lapham in fact, felt the pang of parting in all
its keenness.  Whatever regret the others had was softened to them by
the likeness of their flitting to many of those removals for the summer
which they made in the late spring when they left Nankeen Square; they
were going directly into the country instead of to the seaside first;
but Lapham, who usually remained in town long after they had gone, knew
all the difference.  For his nerves there was no mechanical sense of
coming back; this was as much the end of his proud, prosperous life as
death itself could have been.  He was returning to begin life anew, but
he knew as well as he knew that he should not find his vanished youth
in his native hills, that it could never again be the triumph that it
had been.  That was impossible, not only in his stiffened and weakened
forces, but in the very nature of things.  He was going back, by grace
of the man whom he owed money, to make what he could out of the one
chance which his successful rivals had left him.

In one phase his paint had held its own against bad times and ruinous
competition, and it was with the hope of doing still more with the
Persis Brand that he now set himself to work.  The West Virginia people
confessed that they could not produce those fine grades, and they
willingly left the field to him.  A strange, not ignoble friendliness
existed between Lapham and the three brothers; they had used him
fairly; it was their facilities that had conquered him, not their
ill-will; and he recognised in them without enmity the necessity to
which he had yielded.  If he succeeded in his efforts to develop his
paint in this direction, it must be for a long time on a small scale
compared with his former business, which it could never equal, and he
brought to them the flagging energies of an elderly man.  He was more
broken than he knew by his failure; it did not kill, as it often does,
but it weakened the spring once so strong and elastic.  He lapsed more
and more into acquiescence with his changed condition, and that
bragging note of his was rarely sounded.  He worked faithfully enough
in his enterprise, but sometimes he failed to seize occasions that in
his younger days he would have turned to golden account.  His wife saw
in him a daunted look that made her heart ache for him.

One result of his friendly relations with the West Virginia people was
that Corey went in with them, and the fact that he did so solely upon
Lapham's advice, and by means of his recommendation, was perhaps the
Colonel's proudest consolation.  Corey knew the business thoroughly,
and after half a year at Kanawha Falls and in the office at New York,
he went out to Mexico and Central America, to see what could be done
for them upon the ground which he had theoretically studied with Lapham.

Before he went he came up to Vermont, and urged Penelope to go with
him.  He was to be first in the city of Mexico, and if his mission was
successful he was to be kept there and in South America several years,
watching the new railroad enterprises and the development of mechanical
agriculture and whatever other undertakings offered an opening for the
introduction of the paint.  They were all young men together, and
Corey, who had put his money into the company, had a proprietary
interest in the success which they were eager to achieve.

"There's no more reason now and no less than ever there was," mused
Penelope, in counsel with her mother, "why I should say Yes, or why I
should say No. Everything else changes, but this is just where it was a
year ago.  It don't go backward, and it don't go forward.  Mother, I
believe I shall take the bit in my teeth--if anybody will put it there!"

"It isn't the same as it was," suggested her mother.  "You can see that
Irene's all over it."

"That's no credit to me," said Penelope.  "I ought to be just as much
ashamed as ever."

"You no need ever to be ashamed."

"That's true, too," said the girl.  "And I can sneak off to Mexico with
a good conscience if I could make up my mind to it."  She laughed.
"Well, if I could be SENTENCED to be married, or somebody would up and
forbid the banns! I don't know what to do about it."

Her mother left her to carry her hesitation back to Corey, and she said
now, they had better go all over it and try to reason it out.  "And I
hope that whatever I do, it won't be for my own sake, but for--others!"

Corey said he was sure of that, and looked at her with eyes of patient
tenderness.

"I don't say it is wrong," she proceeded, rather aimlessly, "but I
can't make it seem right.  I don't know whether I can make you
understand, but the idea of being happy, when everybody else is so
miserable, is more than I can endure.  It makes me wretched."

"Then perhaps that's your share of the common suffering," suggested
Corey, smiling.

"Oh, you know it isn't! You know it's nothing.  Oh! One of the reasons
is what I told you once before, that as long as father is in trouble I
can't let you think of me.  Now that he's lost everything--?" She bent
her eyes inquiringly upon him, as if for the effect of this argument.

"I don't think that's a very good reason," he answered seriously, but
smiling still.  "Do you believe me when I tell you that I love you?"

"Why, I suppose I must," she said, dropping her eyes.

"Then why shouldn't I think all the more of you on account of your
father's loss? You didn't suppose I cared for you because he was
prosperous?"

There was a shade of reproach, ever so delicate and gentle, in his
smiling question, which she felt.

"No, I couldn't think such a thing of you.  I--I don't know what I
meant.  I meant that----" She could not go on and say that she had felt
herself more worthy of him because of her father's money; it would not
have been true; yet there was no other explanation.  She stopped, and
cast a helpless glance at him.

He came to her aid.  "I understand why you shouldn't wish me to suffer
by your father's misfortunes."

"Yes, that was it; and there is too great a difference every way.  We
ought to look at that again.  You mustn't pretend that you don't know
it, for that wouldn't be true.  Your mother will never like me, and
perhaps--perhaps I shall not like her."

"Well," said Corey, a little daunted, "you won't have to marry my
family."

"Ah, that isn't the point!"

"I know it," he admitted.  "I won't pretend that I don't see what you
mean; but I'm sure that all the differences would disappear when you
came to know my family better.  I'm not afraid but you and my mother
will like each other--she can't help it!" he exclaimed, less judicially
than he had hitherto spoken, and he went on to urge some points of
doubtful tenability.  "We have our ways, and you have yours; and while
I don't say but what you and my mother and sisters would be a little
strange together at first, it would soon wear off, on both sides.
There can't be anything hopelessly different in you all, and if there
were it wouldn't be any difference to me."

"Do you think it would be pleasant to have you on my side against your
mother?"

"There won't be any sides.  Tell me just what it is you're afraid of."

"Afraid?"

"Thinking of, then."

"I don't know.  It isn't anything they say or do," she explained, with
her eyes intent on his.  "It's what they are.  I couldn't be natural
with them, and if I can't be natural with people, I'm disagreeable."

"Can you be natural with me?"

"Oh, I'm not afraid of you.  I never was.  That was the trouble, from
the beginning."

"Well, then, that's all that's necessary.  And it never was the least
trouble to me!"

"It made me untrue to Irene."

"You mustn't say that! You were always true to her."

"She cared for you first."

"Well, but I never cared for her at all!" he besought her.

"She thought you did."

"That was nobody's fault, and I can't let you make it yours.  My
dear----"

"Wait. We must understand each other," said Penelope, rising from her
seat to prevent an advance he was making from his; "I want you to
realise the whole affair.  Should you want a girl who hadn't a cent in
the world, and felt different in your mother's company, and had cheated
and betrayed her own sister?"

"I want you!"

"Very well, then, you can't have me.  I should always despise myself.
I ought to give you up for all these reasons.  Yes, I must." She looked
at him intently, and there was a tentative quality in her affirmations.

"Is this your answer?" he said.  "I must submit.  If I asked too much
of you, I was wrong.  And--good-bye."

He held out his hand, and she put hers in it.  "You think I'm
capricious and fickle!" she said.  "I can't help it--I don't know
myself.  I can't keep to one thing for half a day at a time.  But it's
right for us to part--yes, it must be.  It must be," she repeated; "and
I shall try to remember that.  Good-bye! I will try to keep that in my
mind, and you will too--you won't care, very soon! I didn't mean
THAT--no; I know how true you are; but you will soon look at me
differently; and see that even IF there hadn't been this about Irene, I
was not the one for you.  You do think so, don't you?" she pleaded,
clinging to his hand.  "I am not at all what they would like--your
family; I felt that.  I am little, and black, and homely, and they
don't understand my way of talking, and now that we've lost
everything--No, I'm not fit.  Good-bye. You're quite right, not to have
patience with me any longer.  I've tried you enough.  I ought to be
willing to marry you against their wishes if you want me to, but I
can't make the sacrifice--I'm too selfish for that----" All at once she
flung herself on his breast.  "I can't even give you up! I shall never
dare look any one in the face again.  Go, go! But take me with you! I
tried to do without you! I gave it a fair trial, and it was a dead
failure.  O poor Irene! How could she give you up?"

Corey went back to Boston immediately, and left Penelope, as he must,
to tell her sister that they were to be married.  She was spared from
the first advance toward this by an accident or a misunderstanding.
Irene came straight to her after Corey was gone, and demanded,
"Penelope Lapham, have you been such a ninny as to send that man away
on my account?"

Penelope recoiled from this terrible courage; she did not answer
directly, and Irene went on, "Because if you did, I'll thank you to
bring him back again.  I'm not going to have him thinking that I'm
dying for a man that never cared for me.  It's insulting, and I'm not
going to stand it.  Now, you just send for him!"

"Oh, I will, 'Rene," gasped Penelope.  And then she added, shamed out
of her prevarication by Irene's haughty magnanimity, "I have.  That
is--he's coming back----"

Irene looked at her a moment, and then, whatever thought was in her
mind, said fiercely, "Well!" and left her to her dismay--her dismay and
her relief, for they both knew that this was the last time they should
ever speak of that again.

The marriage came after so much sorrow and trouble, and the fact was
received with so much misgiving for the past and future, that it
brought Lapham none of the triumph in which he had once exulted at the
thought of an alliance with the Coreys.  Adversity had so far been his
friend that it had taken from him all hope of the social success for
which people crawl and truckle, and restored him, through failure and
doubt and heartache, the manhood which his prosperity had so nearly
stolen from him.  Neither he nor his wife thought now that their
daughter was marrying a Corey; they thought only that she was giving
herself to the man who loved her, and their acquiescence was sobered
still further by the presence of Irene.  Their hearts were far more
with her.

Again and again Mrs. Lapham said she did not see how she could go
through it.  "I can't make it seem right," she said.

"It IS right," steadily answered the Colonel.

"Yes, I know.  But it don't SEEM so."

It would be easy to point out traits in Penelope's character which
finally reconciled all her husband's family and endeared her to them.
These things continually happen in novels; and the Coreys, as they had
always promised themselves to do, made the best, and not the worst of
Tom's marriage.

They were people who could value Lapham's behaviour as Tom reported it
to them.  They were proud of him, and Bromfield Corey, who found a
delicate, aesthetic pleasure in the heroism with which Lapham had
withstood Rogers and his temptations--something finely dramatic and
unconsciously effective,--wrote him a letter which would once have
flattered the rough soul almost to ecstasy, though now he affected to
slight it in showing it.  "It's all right if it makes it more
comfortable for Pen," he said to his wife.

But the differences remained uneffaced, if not uneffaceable, between
the Coreys and Tom Corey's wife.  "If he had only married the Colonel!"
subtly suggested Nanny Corey.

There was a brief season of civility and forbearance on both sides,
when he brought her home before starting for Mexico, and her
father-in-law made a sympathetic feint of liking Penelope's way of
talking, but it is questionable if even he found it so delightful as
her husband did.  Lily Corey made a little, ineffectual sketch of her,
which she put by with other studies to finish up, sometime, and found
her rather picturesque in some ways.  Nanny got on with her better than
the rest, and saw possibilities for her in the country to which she was
going.  "As she's quite unformed, socially," she explained to her
mother, "there is a chance that she will form herself on the Spanish
manner, if she stays there long enough, and that when she comes back
she will have the charm of, not olives, perhaps, but tortillas,
whatever they are: something strange and foreign, even if it's
borrowed.  I'm glad she's going to Mexico.  At that distance we
can--correspond."

Her mother sighed, and said bravely that she was sure they all got on
very pleasantly as it was, and that she was perfectly satisfied if Tom
was.

There was, in fact, much truth in what she said of their harmony with
Penelope.  Having resolved, from the beginning, to make the best of the
worst, it might almost be said that they were supported and consoled in
their good intentions by a higher power.  This marriage had not, thanks
to an over-ruling Providence, brought the succession of Lapham teas
upon Bromfield Corey which he had dreaded; the Laphams were far off in
their native fastnesses, and neither Lily nor Nanny Corey was obliged
to sacrifice herself to the conversation of Irene; they were not even
called upon to make a social demonstration for Penelope at a time when,
most people being still out of town, it would have been so easy; she
and Tom had both begged that there might be nothing of that kind; and
though none of the Coreys learned to know her very well in the week she
spent with them, they did not find it hard to get on with her.  There
were even moments when Nanny Corey, like her father, had glimpses of
what Tom had called her humour, but it was perhaps too unlike their own
to be easily recognisable.

Whether Penelope, on her side, found it more difficult to harmonise, I
cannot say.  She had much more of the harmonising to do, since they
were four to one; but then she had gone through so much greater trials
before.  When the door of their carriage closed and it drove off with
her and her husband to the station, she fetched a long sigh.

"What is it?" asked Corey, who ought to have known better.

"Oh, nothing.  I don't think I shall feel strange amongst the Mexicans
now."

He looked at her with a puzzled smile, which grew a little graver, and
then he put his arm round her and drew her closer to him.  This made
her cry on his shoulder.  "I only meant that I should have you all to
myself." There is no proof that she meant more, but it is certain that
our manners and customs go for more in life than our qualities.  The
price that we pay for civilisation is the fine yet impassable
differentiation of these.  Perhaps we pay too much; but it will not be
possible to persuade those who have the difference in their favour that
this is so.  They may be right; and at any rate, the blank misgiving,
the recurring sense of disappointment to which the young people's
departure left the Coreys is to be considered.  That was the end of
their son and brother for them; they felt that; and they were not mean
or unamiable people.

He remained three years away.  Some changes took place in that time.
One of these was the purchase by the Kanawha Falls Company of the mines
and works at Lapham.  The transfer relieved Lapham of the load of debt
which he was still labouring under, and gave him an interest in the
vaster enterprise of the younger men, which he had once vainly hoped to
grasp all in his own hand.  He began to tell of this coincidence as
something very striking; and pushing on more actively the special
branch of the business left to him, he bragged, quite in his old way,
of its enormous extension.  His son-in-law, he said, was pushing it in
Mexico and Central America: an idea that they had originally had in
common.  Well, young blood was what was wanted in a thing of that kind.
Now, those fellows out in West Virginia: all young, and a perfect team!

For himself, he owned that he had made mistakes; he could see just
where the mistakes were--put his finger right on them.  But one thing
he could say: he had been no man's enemy but his own; every dollar,
every cent had gone to pay his debts; he had come out with clean hands.
He said all this, and much more, to Mr. Sewell the summer after he sold
out, when the minister and his wife stopped at Lapham on their way
across from the White Mountains to Lake Champlain; Lapham had found
them on the cars, and pressed them to stop off.

There were times when Mrs. Lapham had as great pride in the
clean-handedness with which Lapham had come out as he had himself, but
her satisfaction was not so constant.  At those times, knowing the
temptations he had resisted, she thought him the noblest and grandest
of men; but no woman could endure to live in the same house with a
perfect hero, and there were other times when she reminded him that if
he had kept his word to her about speculating in stocks, and had looked
after the insurance of his property half as carefully as he had looked
after a couple of worthless women who had no earthly claim on him, they
would not be where they were now.  He humbly admitted it all, and left
her to think of Rogers herself.  She did not fail to do so, and the
thought did not fail to restore him to her tenderness again.

I do not know how it is that clergymen and physicians keep from telling
their wives the secrets confided to them; perhaps they can trust their
wives to find them out for themselves whenever they wish.  Sewell had
laid before his wife the case of the Laphams after they came to consult
with him about Corey's proposal to Penelope, for he wished to be
confirmed in his belief that he had advised them soundly; but he had
not given her their names, and he had not known Corey's himself.  Now
he had no compunctions in talking the affair over with her without the
veil of ignorance which she had hitherto assumed, for she declared that
as soon as she heard of Corey's engagement to Penelope, the whole thing
had flashed upon her.  "And that night at dinner I could have told the
child that he was in love with her sister by the way he talked about
her; I heard him; and if she had not been so blindly in love with him
herself, she would have known it too.  I must say, I can't help feeling
a sort of contempt for her sister."

"Oh, but you must not!" cried Sewell.  "That is wrong, cruelly wrong.
I'm sure that's out of your novel-reading, my dear, and not out of your
heart.  Come! It grieves me to hear you say such a thing as that."

"Oh, I dare say this pretty thing has got over it--how much character
she has got!--and I suppose she'll see somebody else."

Sewell had to content himself with this partial concession.  As a
matter of fact, unless it was the young West Virginian who had come on
to arrange the purchase of the Works, Irene had not yet seen any one,
and whether there was ever anything between them is a fact that would
need a separate inquiry.  It is certain that at the end of five years
after the disappointment which she met so bravely, she was still
unmarried.  But she was even then still very young, and her life at
Lapham had been varied by visits to the West.  It had also been varied
by an invitation, made with the politest resolution by Mrs. Corey, to
visit in Boston, which the girl was equal to refusing in the same
spirit.

Sewell was intensely interested in the moral spectacle which Lapham
presented under his changed conditions.  The Colonel, who was more the
Colonel in those hills than he could ever have been on the Back Bay,
kept him and Mrs. Sewell over night at his house; and he showed the
minister minutely round the Works and drove him all over his farm.  For
this expedition he employed a lively colt which had not yet come of
age, and an open buggy long past its prime, and was no more ashamed of
his turnout than of the finest he had ever driven on the Milldam.  He
was rather shabby and slovenly in dress, and he had fallen unkempt,
after the country fashion, as to his hair and beard and boots.  The
house was plain, and was furnished with the simpler moveables out of
the house in Nankeen Square.  There were certainly all the necessaries,
but no luxuries unless the statues of Prayer and Faith might be so
considered.  The Laphams now burned kerosene, of course, and they had
no furnace in the winter; these were the only hardships the Colonel
complained of; but he said that as soon as the company got to paying
dividends again,--he was evidently proud of the outlays that for the
present prevented this,--he should put in steam heat and naphtha-gas.
He spoke freely of his failure, and with a confidence that seemed
inspired by his former trust in Sewell, whom, indeed, he treated like
an intimate friend, rather than an acquaintance of two or three
meetings.  He went back to his first connection with Rogers, and he put
before Sewell hypothetically his own conclusions in regard to the
matter.

"Sometimes," he said, "I get to thinking it all over, and it seems to
me I done wrong about Rogers in the first place; that the whole trouble
came from that.  It was just like starting a row of bricks.  I tried to
catch up and stop 'em from going, but they all tumbled, one after
another.  It wa'n't in the nature of things that they could be stopped
till the last brick went.  I don't talk much with my wife, any more
about it; but I should like to know how it strikes you."

"We can trace the operation of evil in the physical world," replied the
minister, "but I'm more and more puzzled about it in the moral world.
There its course is often so very obscure; and often it seems to
involve, so far as we can see, no penalty whatever.  And in your own
case, as I understand, you don't admit--you don't feel sure--that you
ever actually did wrong this man----"

"Well, no; I don't. That is to say----"

He did not continue, and after a while Sewell said, with that subtle
kindness of his, "I should be inclined to think--nothing can be thrown
quite away; and it can't be that our sins only weaken us--that your
fear of having possibly behaved selfishly toward this man kept you on
your guard, and strengthened you when you were brought face to face
with a greater"--he was going to say temptation, but he saved Lapham's
pride, and said--"emergency."

"Do you think so?"

"I think that there may be truth in what I suggest."

"Well, I don't know what it was," said Lapham; "all I know is that when
it came to the point, although I could see that I'd got to go under
unless I did it--that I couldn't sell out to those Englishmen, and I
couldn't let that man put his money into my business without I told him
just how things stood."

As Sewell afterwards told his wife, he could see that the loss of his
fortune had been a terrible trial to Lapham, just because his
prosperity had been so gross and palpable; and he had now a burning
desire to know exactly how, at the bottom of his heart, Lapham still
felt. "And do you ever have any regrets?" he delicately inquired of
him.

"About what I done? Well, it don't always seem as if I done it,"
replied Lapham. "Seems sometimes as if it was a hole opened for me,
and I crept out of it. I don't know," he added thoughtfully, biting
the corner of his stiff moustache. "I don't know as I should always
say it paid; but if I done it, and the thing was to do over again,
right in the same way, I guess I should have to do it."

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Silas returns from a conference with a man who wanted to unknowingly invest in the Lapham paint works; his money would have enabled Silas to close with the West Virginians. Silas cannot let him enter into the deal unaware and tells him the condition of his business. The offer is withdrawn, and Silas must put himself in his creditor's hands. Lapham sells the South End home and moves back to the farm. The West Virginians confess they cannot produce a fine grade of paint like the Persis Brand; they let Silas handle this part of the enterprise after buying the mines and works at Lapham. This purchase relieves Lapham of the load of debt and gives him an interest in the vaster enterprise of the younger men. Because of Silas good standing with the West Virginians Tom Corey goes with them. After marrying Penelope he goes to Mexico to work in the foreign paint market. Sewell, the pastor, interested in the moral spectacle which Lapham presented, visits him on the farm. When Sewell asks Lapham his conclusions on the moral question involving Rogers, Lapham replies, "It seems to me that I done wrong about Rogers in the first place. It was just like starting a row of bricks, I tried to catch and stop 'em from going, but they tumbled one after another." The English situation, Silas felt, was like a hole that opened for him, and he crept out.


prompt:
Chapter: THIS is the saddest story I have ever heard. We had known the
Ashburnhams for nine seasons of the town of Nauheim with an extreme
intimacy--or, rather with an acquaintanceship as loose and easy and yet
as close as a good glove's with your hand. My wife and I knew Captain
and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it was possible to know anybody, and yet,
in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them. This is, I believe,
a state of things only possible with English people of whom, till today,
when I sit down to puzzle out what I know of this sad affair, I knew
nothing whatever. Six months ago I had never been to England, and,
certainly, I had never sounded the depths of an English heart. I had
known the shallows.

I don't mean to say that we were not acquainted with many English
people. Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe, and being, as we
perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much as to say that we
were un-American, we were thrown very much into the society of the
nicer English. Paris, you see, was our home. Somewhere between Nice and
Bordighera provided yearly winter quarters for us, and Nauheim always
received us from July to September. You will gather from this statement
that one of us had, as the saying is, a "heart", and, from the statement
that my wife is dead, that she was the sufferer.

Captain Ashburnham also had a heart. But, whereas a yearly month or so
at Nauheim tuned him up to exactly the right pitch for the rest of the
twelvemonth, the two months or so were only just enough to keep
poor Florence alive from year to year. The reason for his heart was,
approximately, polo, or too much hard sportsmanship in his youth. The
reason for poor Florence's broken years was a storm at sea upon our
first crossing to Europe, and the immediate reasons for our imprisonment
in that continent were doctor's orders. They said that even the short
Channel crossing might well kill the poor thing.

When we all first met, Captain Ashburnham, home on sick leave from an
India to which he was never to return, was thirty-three; Mrs Ashburnham
Leonora--was thirty-one. I was thirty-six and poor Florence thirty.
Thus today Florence would have been thirty-nine and Captain Ashburnham
forty-two; whereas I am forty-five and Leonora forty. You will perceive,
therefore, that our friendship has been a young-middle-aged affair,
since we were all of us of quite quiet dispositions, the Ashburnhams
being more particularly what in England it is the custom to call "quite
good people".

They were descended, as you will probably expect, from the Ashburnham
who accompanied Charles I to the scaffold, and, as you must also expect
with this class of English people, you would never have noticed it.
Mrs Ashburnham was a Powys; Florence was a Hurlbird of Stamford,
Connecticut, where, as you know, they are more old-fashioned than even
the inhabitants of Cranford, England, could have been. I myself am a
Dowell of Philadelphia, Pa., where, it is historically true, there
are more old English families than you would find in any six English
counties taken together. I carry about with me, indeed--as if it
were the only thing that invisibly anchored me to any spot upon the
globe--the title deeds of my farm, which once covered several blocks
between Chestnut and Walnut Streets. These title deeds are of wampum,
the grant of an Indian chief to the first Dowell, who left Farnham in
Surrey in company with William Penn. Florence's people, as is so
often the case with the inhabitants of Connecticut, came from the
neighbourhood of Fordingbridge, where the Ashburnhams' place is. From
there, at this moment, I am actually writing.

You may well ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it
is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or
the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have
witnessed for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely
remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

Some one has said that the death of a mouse from cancer is the whole
sack of Rome by the Goths, and I swear to you that the breaking up
of our little four-square coterie was such another unthinkable event.
Supposing that you should come upon us sitting together at one of the
little tables in front of the club house, let us say, at Homburg, taking
tea of an afternoon and watching the miniature golf, you would have said
that, as human affairs go, we were an extraordinarily safe castle. We
were, if you will, one of those tall ships with the white sails upon a
blue sea, one of those things that seem the proudest and the safest of
all the beautiful and safe things that God has permitted the mind of men
to frame. Where better could one take refuge? Where better?

Permanence? Stability? I can't believe it's gone. I can't believe that
that long, tranquil life, which was just stepping a minuet, vanished in
four crashing days at the end of nine years and six weeks. Upon my word,
yes, our intimacy was like a minuet, simply because on every possible
occasion and in every possible circumstance we knew where to go, where
to sit, which table we unanimously should choose; and we could rise and
go, all four together, without a signal from any one of us, always to
the music of the Kur orchestra, always in the temperate sunshine, or, if
it rained, in discreet shelters. No, indeed, it can't be gone. You can't
kill a minuet de la cour. You may shut up the music-book, close the
harpsichord; in the cupboard and presses the rats may destroy the white
satin favours. The mob may sack Versailles; the Trianon may fall, but
surely the minuet--the minuet itself is dancing itself away into the
furthest stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must
be stepping itself still. Isn't there any heaven where old beautiful
dances, old beautiful intimacies prolong themselves? Isn't there any
Nirvana pervaded by the faint thrilling of instruments that have
fallen into the dust of wormwood but that yet had frail, tremulous, and
everlasting souls?

No, by God, it is false! It wasn't a minuet that we stepped; it was a
prison--a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so that they
might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along
the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.

And yet I swear by the sacred name of my creator that it was true. It
was true sunshine; the true music; the true splash of the fountains from
the mouth of stone dolphins. For, if for me we were four people with the
same tastes, with the same desires, acting--or, no, not acting--sitting
here and there unanimously, isn't that the truth? If for nine years I
have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover
its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't
it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple? So it may
well be with Edward Ashburnham, with Leonora his wife and with poor dear
Florence. And, if you come to think of it, isn't it a little odd that
the physical rottenness of at least two pillars of our four-square
house never presented itself to my mind as a menace to its security? It
doesn't so present itself now though the two of them are actually dead.
I don't know....

I know nothing--nothing in the world--of the hearts of men. I only know
that I am alone--horribly alone. No hearthstone will ever again witness,
for me, friendly intercourse. No smoking-room will ever be other than
peopled with incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths. Yet, in the
name of God, what should I know if I don't know the life of the hearth
and of the smoking-room, since my whole life has been passed in those
places? The warm hearthside!--Well, there was Florence: I believe
that for the twelve years her life lasted, after the storm that seemed
irretrievably to have weakened her heart--I don't believe that for one
minute she was out of my sight, except when she was safely tucked up in
bed and I should be downstairs, talking to some good fellow or other in
some lounge or smoking-room or taking my final turn with a cigar before
going to bed. I don't, you understand, blame Florence. But how can she
have known what she knew? How could she have got to know it? To know it
so fully. Heavens! There doesn't seem to have been the actual time. It
must have been when I was taking my baths, and my Swedish exercises,
being manicured. Leading the life I did, of the sedulous, strained
nurse, I had to do something to keep myself fit. It must have been then!
Yet even that can't have been enough time to get the tremendously long
conversations full of worldly wisdom that Leonora has reported to
me since their deaths. And is it possible to imagine that during our
prescribed walks in Nauheim and the neighbourhood she found time to
carry on the protracted negotiations which she did carry on between
Edward Ashburnham and his wife? And isn't it incredible that during
all that time Edward and Leonora never spoke a word to each other in
private? What is one to think of humanity?

For I swear to you that they were the model couple. He was as devoted
as it was possible to be without appearing fatuous. So well set up,
with such honest blue eyes, such a touch of stupidity, such a warm
goodheartedness! And she--so tall, so splendid in the saddle, so fair!
Yes, Leonora was extraordinarily fair and so extraordinarily the real
thing that she seemed too good to be true. You don't, I mean, as a rule,
get it all so superlatively together. To be the county family, to look
the county family, to be so appropriately and perfectly wealthy; to be
so perfect in manner--even just to the saving touch of insolence that
seems to be necessary. To have all that and to be all that! No, it was
too good to be true. And yet, only this afternoon, talking over the
whole matter she said to me: "Once I tried to have a lover but I was
so sick at the heart, so utterly worn out that I had to send him away."
That struck me as the most amazing thing I had ever heard. She said "I
was actually in a man's arms. Such a nice chap! Such a dear fellow! And
I was saying to myself, fiercely, hissing it between my teeth, as they
say in novels--and really clenching them together: I was saying to
myself: 'Now, I'm in for it and I'll really have a good time for once in
my life--for once in my life!' It was in the dark, in a carriage, coming
back from a hunt ball. Eleven miles we had to drive! And then suddenly
the bitterness of the endless poverty, of the endless acting--it fell on
me like a blight, it spoilt everything. Yes, I had to realize that I had
been spoilt even for the good time when it came. And I burst out crying
and I cried and I cried for the whole eleven miles. Just imagine me
crying! And just imagine me making a fool of the poor dear chap like
that. It certainly wasn't playing the game, was it now?"

I don't know; I don't know; was that last remark of hers the remark of
a harlot, or is it what every decent woman, county family or not county
family, thinks at the bottom of her heart? Or thinks all the time for
the matter of that? Who knows?

Yet, if one doesn't know that at this hour and day, at this pitch of
civilization to which we have attained, after all the preachings of
all the moralists, and all the teachings of all the mothers to all the
daughters in saecula saeculorum... but perhaps that is what all mothers
teach all daughters, not with lips but with the eyes, or with heart
whispering to heart. And, if one doesn't know as much as that about the
first thing in the world, what does one know and why is one here?

I asked Mrs Ashburnham whether she had told Florence that and what
Florence had said and she answered:--"Florence didn't offer any comment
at all. What could she say? There wasn't anything to be said. With the
grinding poverty we had to put up with to keep up appearances, and the
way the poverty came about--you know what I mean--any woman would have
been justified in taking a lover and presents too. Florence once said
about a very similar position--she was a little too well-bred, too
American, to talk about mine--that it was a case of perfectly open
riding and the woman could just act on the spur of the moment. She said
it in American of course, but that was the sense of it. I think her
actual words were: 'That it was up to her to take it or leave it....'"

I don't want you to think that I am writing Teddy Ashburnham down a
brute. I don't believe he was. God knows, perhaps all men are like that.
For as I've said what do I know even of the smoking-room? Fellows come
in and tell the most extraordinarily gross stories--so gross that they
will positively give you a pain. And yet they'd be offended if you
suggested that they weren't the sort of person you could trust your wife
alone with. And very likely they'd be quite properly offended--that is
if you can trust anybody alone with anybody. But that sort of fellow
obviously takes more delight in listening to or in telling gross
stories--more delight than in anything else in the world. They'll
hunt languidly and dress languidly and dine languidly and work without
enthusiasm and find it a bore to carry on three minutes' conversation
about anything whatever and yet, when the other sort of conversation
begins, they'll laugh and wake up and throw themselves about in their
chairs. Then, if they so delight in the narration, how is it possible
that they can be offended--and properly offended--at the suggestion
that they might make attempts upon your wife's honour? Or again:
Edward Ashburnham was the cleanest looking sort of chap;--an excellent
magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they
said, in Hampshire, England. To the poor and to hopeless drunkards, as I
myself have witnessed, he was like a painstaking guardian. And he never
told a story that couldn't have gone into the columns of the Field more
than once or twice in all the nine years of my knowing him. He didn't
even like hearing them; he would fidget and get up and go out to buy a
cigar or something of that sort. You would have said that he was just
exactly the sort of chap that you could have trusted your wife with. And
I trusted mine and it was madness. And yet again you have me. If poor
Edward was dangerous because of the chastity of his expressions--and
they say that is always the hall-mark of a libertine--what about myself?
For I solemnly avow that not only have I never so much as hinted at an
impropriety in my conversation in the whole of my days; and more than
that, I will vouch for the cleanness of my thoughts and the absolute
chastity of my life. At what, then, does it all work out? Is the whole
thing a folly and a mockery? Am I no better than a eunuch or is the
proper man--the man with the right to existence--a raging stallion
forever neighing after his neighbour's womankind?

I don't know. And there is nothing to guide us. And if everything is
so nebulous about a matter so elementary as the morals of sex, what
is there to guide us in the more subtle morality of all other personal
contacts, associations, and activities? Or are we meant to act on
impulse alone? It is all a darkness.

I DON'T know how it is best to put this thing down--whether it would
be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a
story; or whether to tell it from this distance of time, as it reached
me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself.

So I shall just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the
fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me.
And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the
distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright
stars. From time to time we shall get up and go to the door and look out
at the great moon and say: "Why, it is nearly as bright as in Provence!"
And then we shall come back to the fireside, with just the touch of a
sigh because we are not in that Provence where even the saddest stories
are gay. Consider the lamentable history of Peire Vidal. Two years ago
Florence and I motored from Biarritz to Las Tours, which is in the Black
Mountains. In the middle of a tortuous valley there rises up an immense
pinnacle and on the pinnacle are four castles--Las Tours, the Towers.
And the immense mistral blew down that valley which was the way from
France into Provence so that the silver grey olive leaves appeared like
hair flying in the wind, and the tufts of rosemary crept into the iron
rocks that they might not be torn up by the roots.

It was, of course, poor dear Florence who wanted to go to Las Tours.
You are to imagine that, however much her bright personality came from
Stamford, Connecticut, she was yet a graduate of Poughkeepsie. I never
could imagine how she did it--the queer, chattery person that she was.
With the far-away look in her eyes--which wasn't, however, in the least
romantic--I mean that she didn't look as if she were seeing poetic
dreams, or looking through you, for she hardly ever did look at
you!--holding up one hand as if she wished to silence any objection--or
any comment for the matter of that--she would talk. She would talk about
William the Silent, about Gustave the Loquacious, about Paris frocks,
about how the poor dressed in 1337, about Fantin-Latour, about the
Paris-Lyons-Mediterranee train-deluxe, about whether it would be
worth while to get off at Tarascon and go across the windswept
suspension-bridge, over the Rhone to take another look at Beaucaire.

We never did take another look at Beaucaire, of course--beautiful
Beaucaire, with the high, triangular white tower, that looked as thin
as a needle and as tall as the Flatiron, between Fifth and
Broadway--Beaucaire with the grey walls on the top of the pinnacle
surrounding an acre and a half of blue irises, beneath the tallness of
the stone pines, What a beautiful thing the stone pine is!...

No, we never did go back anywhere. Not to Heidelberg, not to Hamelin,
not to Verona, not to Mont Majour--not so much as to Carcassonne itself.
We talked of it, of course, but I guess Florence got all she wanted out
of one look at a place. She had the seeing eye.

I haven't, unfortunately, so that the world is full of places to which I
want to return--towns with the blinding white sun upon them; stone pines
against the blue of the sky; corners of gables, all carved and painted
with stags and scarlet flowers and crowstepped gables with the little
saint at the top; and grey and pink palazzi and walled towns a mile or
so back from the sea, on the Mediterranean, between Leghorn and Naples.
Not one of them did we see more than once, so that the whole world for
me is like spots of colour in an immense canvas. Perhaps if it weren't
so I should have something to catch hold of now.

Is all this digression or isn't it digression? Again I don't know. You,
the listener, sit opposite me. But you are so silent. You don't tell me
anything. I am, at any rate, trying to get you to see what sort of life
it was I led with Florence and what Florence was like. Well, she was
bright; and she danced. She seemed to dance over the floors of castles
and over seas and over and over and over the salons of modistes and over
the plages of the Riviera--like a gay tremulous beam, reflected from
water upon a ceiling. And my function in life was to keep that bright
thing in existence. And it was almost as difficult as trying to catch
with your hand that dancing reflection. And the task lasted for years.

Florence's aunts used to say that I must be the laziest man in
Philadelphia. They had never been to Philadelphia and they had the New
England conscience. You see, the first thing they said to me when I
called in on Florence in the little ancient, colonial, wooden house
beneath the high, thin-leaved elms--the first question they asked me was
not how I did but what did I do. And I did nothing. I suppose I ought to
have done something, but I didn't see any call to do it. Why does one do
things? I just drifted in and wanted Florence. First I had drifted in
on Florence at a Browning tea, or something of the sort in Fourteenth
Street, which was then still residential. I don't know why I had gone
to New York; I don't know why I had gone to the tea. I don't see why
Florence should have gone to that sort of spelling bee. It wasn't the
place at which, even then, you expected to find a Poughkeepsie graduate.
I guess Florence wanted to raise the culture of the Stuyvesant crowd and
did it as she might have gone in slumming. Intellectual slumming, that
was what it was. She always wanted to leave the world a little more
elevated than she found it. Poor dear thing, I have heard her lecture
Teddy Ashburnham by the hour on the difference between a Franz Hals and
a Wouvermans and why the Pre-Mycenaean statues were cubical with knobs
on the top. I wonder what he made of it? Perhaps he was thankful.

I know I was. For do you understand my whole attentions, my whole
endeavours were to keep poor dear Florence on to topics like the finds
at Cnossos and the mental spirituality of Walter Pater. I had to keep
her at it, you understand, or she might die. For I was solemnly informed
that if she became excited over anything or if her emotions were really
stirred her little heart might cease to beat. For twelve years I had to
watch every word that any person uttered in any conversation and I had
to head it off what the English call "things"--off love, poverty, crime,
religion and the rest of it. Yes, the first doctor that we had when she
was carried off the ship at Havre assured me that this must be done.
Good God, are all these fellows monstrous idiots, or is there a
freemasonry between all of them from end to end of the earth?... That is
what makes me think of that fellow Peire Vidal.

Because, of course, his story is culture and I had to head her towards
culture and at the same time it's so funny and she hadn't got to laugh,
and it's so full of love and she wasn't to think of love. Do you know
the story? Las Tours of the Four Castles had for chatelaine Blanche
Somebody-or-other who was called as a term of commendation, La
Louve--the She-Wolf. And Peire Vidal the Troubadour paid his court to
La Louve. And she wouldn't have anything to do with him. So, out of
compliment to her--the things people do when they're in love!--he
dressed himself up in wolfskins and went up into the Black Mountains.
And the shepherds of the Montagne Noire and their dogs mistook him for
a wolf and he was torn with the fangs and beaten with clubs. So they
carried him back to Las Tours and La Louve wasn't at all impressed. They
polished him up and her husband remonstrated seriously with her. Vidal
was, you see, a great poet and it was not proper to treat a great poet
with indifference.

So Peire Vidal declared himself Emperor of Jerusalem or somewhere
and the husband had to kneel down and kiss his feet though La Louve
wouldn't. And Peire set sail in a rowing boat with four companions to
redeem the Holy Sepulchre. And they struck on a rock somewhere, and,
at great expense, the husband had to fit out an expedition to fetch him
back. And Peire Vidal fell all over the Lady's bed while the husband,
who was a most ferocious warrior, remonstrated some more about the
courtesy that is due to great poets. But I suppose La Louve was the more
ferocious of the two. Anyhow, that is all that came of it. Isn't that a
story?

You haven't an idea of the queer old-fashionedness of Florence's
aunts--the Misses Hurlbird, nor yet of her uncle. An extraordinarily
lovable man, that Uncle John. Thin, gentle, and with a "heart" that made
his life very much what Florence's afterwards became. He didn't reside
at Stamford; his home was in Waterbury where the watches come from. He
had a factory there which, in our queer American way, would change
its functions almost from year to year. For nine months or so it would
manufacture buttons out of bone. Then it would suddenly produce brass
buttons for coachmen's liveries. Then it would take a turn at embossed
tin lids for candy boxes. The fact is that the poor old gentleman, with
his weak and fluttering heart, didn't want his factory to manufacture
anything at all. He wanted to retire. And he did retire when he was
seventy. But he was so worried at having all the street boys in the town
point after him and exclaim: "There goes the laziest man in Waterbury!"
that he tried taking a tour round the world. And Florence and a young
man called Jimmy went with him. It appears from what Florence told me
that Jimmy's function with Mr Hurlbird was to avoid exciting topics for
him. He had to keep him, for instance, out of political discussions. For
the poor old man was a violent Democrat in days when you might travel
the world over without finding anything but a Republican. Anyhow, they
went round the world.

I think an anecdote is about the best way to give you an idea of what
the old gentleman was like. For it is perhaps important that you should
know what the old gentleman was; he had a great deal of influence in
forming the character of my poor dear wife.

Just before they set out from San Francisco for the South Seas old Mr
Hurlbird said he must take something with him to make little presents to
people he met on the voyage. And it struck him that the things to
take for that purpose were oranges--because California is the orange
country--and comfortable folding chairs. So he bought I don't know
how many cases of oranges--the great cool California oranges, and
half-a-dozen folding chairs in a special case that he always kept in his
cabin. There must have been half a cargo of fruit.

For, to every person on board the several steamers that they
employed--to every person with whom he had so much as a nodding
acquaintance, he gave an orange every morning. And they lasted him right
round the girdle of this mighty globe of ours. When they were at North
Cape, even, he saw on the horizon, poor dear thin man that he was, a
lighthouse. "Hello," says he to himself, "these fellows must be very
lonely. Let's take them some oranges." So he had a boatload of his fruit
out and had himself rowed to the lighthouse on the horizon. The folding
chairs he lent to any lady that he came across and liked or who seemed
tired and invalidish on the ship. And so, guarded against his heart and,
having his niece with him, he went round the world....

He wasn't obtrusive about his heart. You wouldn't have known he had one.
He only left it to the physical laboratory at Waterbury for the benefit
of science, since he considered it to be quite an extraordinary kind
of heart. And the joke of the matter was that, when, at the age of
eighty-four, just five days before poor Florence, he died of bronchitis
there was found to be absolutely nothing the matter with that organ. It
had certainly jumped or squeaked or something just sufficiently to take
in the doctors, but it appears that that was because of an odd formation
of the lungs. I don't much understand about these matters.

I inherited his money because Florence died five days after him. I wish
I hadn't. It was a great worry. I had to go out to Waterbury just after
Florence's death because the poor dear old fellow had left a good many
charitable bequests and I had to appoint trustees. I didn't like the
idea of their not being properly handled.

Yes, it was a great worry. And just as I had got things roughly settled
I received the extraordinary cable from Ashburnham begging me to come
back and have a talk with him. And immediately afterwards came one from
Leonora saying, "Yes, please do come. You could be so helpful." It was
as if he had sent the cable without consulting her and had afterwards
told her. Indeed, that was pretty much what had happened, except that
he had told the girl and the girl told the wife. I arrived, however, too
late to be of any good if I could have been of any good. And then I had
my first taste of English life. It was amazing. It was overwhelming. I
never shall forget the polished cob that Edward, beside me, drove; the
animal's action, its high-stepping, its skin that was like satin. And
the peace! And the red cheeks! And the beautiful, beautiful old house.

Just near Branshaw Teleragh it was and we descended on it from the high,
clear, windswept waste of the New Forest. I tell you it was amazing
to arrive there from Waterbury. And it came into my head--for Teddy
Ashburnham, you remember, had cabled to me to "come and have a talk"
with him--that it was unbelievable that anything essentially calamitous
could happen to that place and those people. I tell you it was the very
spirit of peace. And Leonora, beautiful and smiling, with her coils of
yellow hair, stood on the top doorstep, with a butler and footman and a
maid or so behind her. And she just said: "So glad you've come," as if
I'd run down to lunch from a town ten miles away, instead of having come
half the world over at the call of two urgent telegrams.

The girl was out with the hounds, I think. And that poor devil beside me
was in an agony. Absolute, hopeless, dumb agony such as passes the mind
of man to imagine.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Part I, Section I Ford Madox Ford opens his novel with Dowell's simple statement that "this is the saddest story I have ever heard." John Dowell proceeds to narrate the history of the nine-year acquaintance between himself and his wife, Florence, and an English couple, the Ashburnhams. The two couples are intimately associated. Dowell and his wife are leisured Americans who live in Paris and summer in Nauheim; the weather is better there for Florence, who has a heart condition. Captain Ashburnham also has a heart condition, and has come to Nauheim with his wife Leonora to recuperate. They are all very close in age, and Dowell calls them "quite good people." All four come from old, established families; Dowell is from Philadelphia and Florence is from Connecticut . The Ashburnhams are descended from old Loyalists who kept their manor in Fordingbridge. Dowell explains to the reader why he is writing: he has seen destruction and longs to get the sight out of his head. He compares the relationship of the two couples to a minuet and to a prison of screaming hysterics. He claims that at least two pillars of their four-square house were rotten, and says that he was blind to the damage until it was too late. He feels horribly alone. He does not blame Florence for what has occurred; he does not understand how she was ever out of his sight. Dowell describes the Ashburnhams as the "model couple," who are and who appear to be the county family. Years ago, Leonora told Dowell that once she tried to take a lover in the back of a carriage, but she was unable and ended up in tears. Dowell considers both Ashburnhams to be morally upright. He describes Edward Ashburnham as "the cleanest looking sort of chap, an excellent magistrate, a first rate soldier, just exactly the sort of chap you could have trusted your wife with." Dowell then vouches for his own cleanness of thoughts and absolute chastity of life. He ends the chapter wondering whether all of morality is a folly and a mockery. He concludes that if the morality of such a basic act as sex is blurred, then there is nothing to guide us, "it is all a darkness." Part I, Section II Dowell begins section II by admitting that he does not know how to tell this story. He decides to imagine himself at the fireplace of a country cottage, "with a sympathetic soul opposite." He describes Florence as a woman with the "seeing eye," as one who loves history, and who loves to talk, but dislikes listening. They travelled frequently, but Florence only needed to see each place once. Dowell's sole function during their marriage is to keep Florence alive by keeping her away from topics that might upset her. Florence's aunts, the Misses Hurlbird, used to say that Dowell was the laziest man in Philadelphia. With all the money he wants, Dowell has no need to work. Dowell describes Florence's family, the Misses Hurlbird and Uncle John, as extremely old-fashioned but lovable. Uncle John was told by the doctors he had a heart condition, and after years of working at his facotry, John finally decided to take a rest and tour around the world, bringing oranges to everyone he meets. Though Uncle John turns out not to have a heart condition, he dies five days before Florence. Dowell has to travel to Connecticut to appoint trustees and take care of the will, since he is now the inheritor of the Hurlbird estate. While he is in Connecticut, Dowell receives a letter from the Ashburnhams asking him to come visit their home in England. Dowell hurries over to England to meet their request and is greeted warmly by Leonora, but senses that Edward is in agony. In this chapter, Dowell includes the story of La Louve, the She-wolf, who refuses Peire Vidal, a poet who is in love with her. He commits crazy stunts to get her attention, and finally her husband forces her to be with him, because courtesy is due to great poets. Dowell adds that, of the two, "she was the more ferocious."