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    The Bulwark
    The Bulwark
    The Bulwark
    Ebook416 pages8 hours

    The Bulwark

    By Theodore Dreiser

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    A young Quaker finds material success—and moral challenge—after marrying into a wealthy Philadelphia family, in a novel by the author of Sister Carrie.
     
    Rufus and Hannah Barnes are good Quakers, highly respected in their new community of Dukla, Pennsylvania and strictly loyal to their faith. They pass this loyalty on to their children, including Solon Barnes, who must hold on to his Quaker convictions while living in an increasingly materialistic modern society.
     
    After falling for the lovely Benecia—a daughter of the wealthy Wallin family—Solon is given a position at her father’s bank in Philadelphia, poised to work his way up from the bottom. But Solon’s faith is challenged by his position at the bank, as his moral values cause him to butt heads with corrupt executives driven by financial gain. Meanwhile, as his own children grow up, they start rebelling against the strict principles they were raised with. As the weight of the world bears down on the noble foundations at the core of his principles, Solon must struggle to remain a bulwark for his faith.
     
    “The great American novelist.”—Publishers Weekly
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateSep 18, 2018
    ISBN9780795351495
    The Bulwark
    Author

    Theodore Dreiser

    Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) was an American novelist and journalist. Born in Indiana, Dreiser was the son of John Paul Dreiser, a German immigrant, and Sarah Maria Schanab, a Mennonite from Ohio who converted to Catholicism and was banished by her community. Raised in a family of thirteen children, of which he was the twelfth, Dreiser attended Indiana University for a year before taking a job as a journalist for the Chicago Globe. While working for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Dreiser wrote articles on Nathaniel Hawthorne and William Dean Howells, as well as interviewed such figures as Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison. In 1900, he published his debut novel Sister Carrie, a naturalist portrait of a young midwestern woman who travels to Chicago to become an actress. Despite poor reviews, he continued writing fiction, but failed to find real success until An American Tragedy (1925), a novel based on the 1906 murder of Grace Brown. Considered a masterpiece of American fiction, the novel grew his reputation immensely, leading to his nomination for the 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature, which ultimately went to fellow American Sinclair Lewis. Committed to socialism and atheism throughout his life, Dreiser was a member of the Communist Party of the United States of America and a lifelong champion of the working class.

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      The Bulwark - Theodore Dreiser

      The Bulwark

      Theodore Dreiser

      Introduction by Michael Lydon

      RosettaBooks New York, 2017

      The Bulwark

      Copyright © 1946 by Doubleday & Company, Inc.

      Introduction by Michael Lydon © 2018

      Cover art and Electronic Edition © 2018 by RosettaBooks LLC

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

      Cover jacket design by

      ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795351495

      POWERFUL, DRAMATIC

      —Edmund Wilson in the New Yorker

      "The Bulwark is a major novel, a substantial piece of work, well conceived and carefully executed, representing its author in his full creative power . . . This is the most solidly built of all his novels."

      —Saturday Review

      "Here, as in his earlier novels, Dreiser is the great and critical biographer of . . . 'the American business man.' "

      —Horace Gregory

      THEODORE DREISER worked as a newspaperman and magazine editor in Chicago and New York. His first novel, Sister Carrie, was banned by its own publisher. An American Tragedy also created a sensation among readers and critics. The Bulwark reveals the ultimate and mature powers of the man widely considered the greatest American writer of this century.

      CONTENTS

      An Introduction to The Bulwark

      PART ONE

      CHAPTER 1

      CHAPTER 2

      CHAPTER 3

      CHAPTER 4

      CHAPTER 5

      CHAPTER 6

      CHAPTER 7

      CHAPTER 8

      CHAPTER 9

      CHAPTER 10

      CHAPTER 11

      CHAPTER 12

      CHAPTER 13

      CHAPTER 14

      CHAPTER 15

      CHAPTER 16

      CHAPTER 17

      CHAPTER 18

      CHAPTER 19

      CHAPTER 20

      CHAPTER 21

      CHAPTER 22

      CHAPTER 23

      CHAPTER 24

      PART TWO

      CHAPTER 25

      CHAPTER 26

      CHAPTER 27

      CHAPTER 28

      CHAPTER 29

      CHAPTER 30

      CHAPTER 31

      CHAPTER 32

      CHAPTER 33

      CHAPTER 34

      CHAPTER 35

      CHAPTER 36

      CHAPTER 37

      CHAPTER 38

      CHAPTER 39

      CHAPTER 40

      CHAPTER 41

      CHAPTER 42

      CHAPTER 43

      CHAPTER 44

      CHAPTER 45

      CHAPTER 46

      CHAPTER 47

      CHAPTER 48

      CHAPTER 49

      PART THREE

      CHAPTER 50

      CHAPTER 51

      CHAPTER 52

      CHAPTER 53

      CHAPTER 54

      CHAPTER 55

      CHAPTER 56

      CHAPTER 57

      CHAPTER 58

      CHAPTER 59

      CHAPTER 60

      CHAPTER 61

      CHAPTER 62

      CHAPTER 63

      CHAPTER 64

      CHAPTER 65

      CHAPTER 66

      CHAPTER 67

      FINIS

      An Introduction to The Bulwark

      by Michael Lydon

      What is a masterpiece?

      A masterpiece is a work of art so profoundly conceived and so superbly executed that, rather than dying in decades, it survives for centuries. Masterpieces assert their truth with no risk of rebuttal. Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn, Rembrandt’s self-portraits, Mozart’s Magic Flute, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—such works embody truths that will never dim or date, will never be revealed as trite or false. Time cannot cripple a masterpiece; masterpieces instead accumulate grace and wisdom by having their truths borne out time and time again. All wars we humans fight renew the truth of the Iliad; all boys and girls who fall in love renew the truth of Romeo and Juliet.

      The Bulwark, Theodore Dreiser’s last novel, written through four tumultuous decades, is one such masterpiece.

      In the fall of 1912, Theodore Dreiser, his reputation rising due to Sister Carrie’s hard-won success, was living in Greenwich Village apart from his wife, and having an affair with Anna Tatum, the daughter of well-to-do Quakers from Fallsington, Pennsylvania. Over their months together, Anna told Dreiser about her family and especially her father, John Ward Tatum, an insurance broker who strove to live by Quaker principles of honesty in business and simplicity at home. Romance with a bohemian writer fueled Anna’s rebellion against solemn Mr. Tatum’s endless talk about the Inner Light, but as she told her stories, Dreiser saw how much she admired her father’s goodness.

      A man who tried to live by the Golden Rule—the character fascinated Dreiser. What would such a character be like? What kind of life he would lead? How would his family, friends, and community consider him? In Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt Dreiser had painted characters adrift in a random universe, their weak attempts at doing good for others doing little good for themselves. He had just based The Financier, the first volume of his Trilogy of Desire, on the ruthless trolley car magnate Charles Yerkes, renaming him Frank Cowperwood. Could he bring the mild-mannered Quaker to life as he had brought the business buccaneer to life? Dreiser decided to try; he’d call him Solon Barnes and the novel The Bulwark. In The Financier he had painted the wolf; in The Bulwark, he would paint the shepherd.

      Dreiser made his first notes for The Bulwark in 1912 while still with Anna; he started writing three years later but soon stopped. By 1916, according to biographer Richard Lingeman, Dreiser had made no forward progress, though The Bulwark was still mulching in his subconscious. A year later he pushed himself to write twenty-eight chapters, but again got stuck. After the enormous success of An American Tragedy in the 20s and 30s, when publishers came calling with offers, Dreiser often told them The Bulwark would be his next novel; it never was. He tried one approach after another but found no way to make Solon Barnes more than a stick figure. Literary gossips said Dreiser was either writing a venomous anti-religious tract or the biography of a modern Christ.

      Neither was true. Through the decades of hard work that he had poured into The Bulwark, Dreiser had also produced a shelf of twenty-plus other books—novels, autobiographies, journalism, essays, short stories, plays and poems—and become a master writer, a realist who painted vibrant portraits of complex human beings, and he drew on all he knew of people to paint soulful poetraits of mild-mannered banker Solon Barnes, his wife Benecia, and their five children, Isobel, Orville, Dorothea, Etta, and Stewart, as they lived quiet lives in and around Thornborough, their graceful estate in farm country near Philadelphia.

      Dreiser succeeded in making The Bulwark a masterpiece, first, by writing simply. Critics have long enjoyed the sport of skewering Dreiser’s prose—elephantine being the most common and absurd adjective—but from their early days together Anna had told him to ignore such tin-eared nonsense: "Don’t, don’t listen to the fools, the asses, the insane people who say you write crudely. I never heard anything more stupid…" Anna was right: sentence by sentence, Dreiser’s plain English paints plain portraits of Solon and the novel’s thirty-odd characters living plain American lives. Here, for example, Solon’s morning routine:

      He arose every morning at six-thirty, inspected the farm and all its animals, and discussed matters with his hired hand. After breakfast he got into his buggy and was driven by the man-of-all-work to Dukla station. At eight fifty-five he emerged from Broad Street station in Philadelphia, and five minutes later arrived at the bank.

      At 5:55 p.m. Solon closed up his desk and went home:

      Important papers were placed in drawers, cubbyholes, and compartments of his roll-top desk; pencils, pens, stamps and sundry other objects were put into a little brown wicker basket on the corner of his desk, and into his briefcase would probably go a few papers regarding some transactions which he intended to work on at home.

      Second, Dreiser wrote The Bulwark with a tender touch. Like Balzac, Dreiser often took a chilly stance toward his characters, letting them drift to their fates unwept. His Bulwark characters, in contrast, he cups gently in the hollow of his hand, studying them with calm, intelligent empathy, never judging them, never fixing their motives in iron chains of cause and effect. Indeed, he unfolds his characters so organically that they blossom through the book like flowers. Here his first full portrait of the teenaged Benecia:

      …Benecia came in, fresh and smiling, and very becomingly dressed, with a few books under her arm. To Solon…she seemed exquisite in a plain dress of two shades of blue, and a waistband of gray, plus a Quakerish bonnet. That pale and yet seemingly healthy face! Those dark violet eyes! Those white hands!

      Third, Dreiser gives his word pictures an impressionist’s shimmer. On page one of the Introduction readers learn that The Bulwark’s time frame is the late in the nineteenth century, but after that Dreiser gives no event a numbered date nor any purchase a dollar amount, and he dots the text with amorphous qualifiers that suggest his characters’ cloudy emotions. Somehow and seem pop up every few pages:

      Somehow this uninvited conversation seemed to augur no easy time for him…

      She sank into her seat, frail and weak and yet somehow distinguished…

      Many writers and editors would trim such qualifiers because they blur Dreiser’s descriptive focus. They do, but to the worthy purpose of giving his word-paintings a suggestive insight. A phrase like somehow distinguished tells us no hard and fast facts, but asks us instead to recall times when we too have been somehow moved by life’s slow rhythms and sudden whims.

      Fourth, Dreiser tells a good story. Stories come in countless shapes and sizes, from one-liner quips to four-volume epics and, when well told, readers love them all. The Bulwark’s story takes the classic form of a human’s life-arc curving inexorably from birth to death. After an introductory flash-forward to Solon and Benecia’s wedding, the narrative loops back to Solon’s boyhood in Maine, and then to Dukla, Dreiser’s pseudonym for Fallsington, where Rufus, Solon’s father, moves the family to help a widowed relative. Sturdy and sensitive Solon falls in love with Benecia, the daughter of a wealthy banker; they marry and children come. Helped by Benecia’s father, Solon too becomes a banker, but as decades pass he sees how his fellow officers risk the depositors’ savings by playing insider games of granting themselves low-interest loans.

      Thus far Dreiser has moved his story ahead at a measured pace, his narrative tone calm and serious. The children grow up, Isobel plain and lonely, Dorothea and Orville avid social climbers. Etta, a dreamy soul (based on Anna Tatum), moves to Greenwich Village and takes up with a painter (based on Dreiser). Stewart, the youngest, chases pretty girls with his prep school pals in their parents’ cars. Step by step, however, building on family rivalries and imbalances lurking just below the surface, Dreiser rachets up the narrative tension to an unforgetable, soul-searing climax—which I will not spoil for you here.

      At the book’s three-quarter mark, The Bulwark begins to ebb slowly and sadly away, Dreiser’s flow of words singing a bass viol’s somber melody. Etta breaks up with the painter and returns home to Thornborough, chastened by romantic disappointment. Solon sinks into a depression so deep that only whispered prayer can bring him solace:

      Our Father, who art in heaven—help me, help me! And then the tears began to flow from his own eyes. I have tried, he ventured to say, but I have not known what to do. Forgive me, and him, my boy, for I have sought to do Thy will and I have erred. Yes, yes, I must have. Perhaps I have not understood—perhaps I have not understood—perhaps I have been too hard, and he began to sob.

      As the 1940s began, Dreiser faced the challenge to write about Solon sinking toward death, knowing that, at seventy-four, his own days were likewise numbered. A small circle of former lovers gathered at his home in Los Angeles to help him give The Bulwark a final edit and to read to him from John Woolman’s Journal, a Quaker tome he’d come to love while writing his own. One day when walking in the garden, marveling at the insects busy in the grass, Dreiser startled a puff adder. The adder swelled up defensively, but when Dreiser apologized for disturbing it, the adder glided over his shoe to say that he knew Dreiser had meant no harm.

      Overjoyed, Dreiser knew he now had the ending of his book, and he, Solon/Theodore, went inside to tell the women what he’d learned:

      Daughter, I know now that we know so little of all that infinite something of which we are a part—and that there are more languages spoken than we have any knowledge of.

      What does thee mean, Father? questioned Isobel.

      I mean that good intent is of itself a universal language, and if our intention is good, all creatures in their particular way understand, and so it was that this puff adder understood me just as I understood it…

      Solon’s momentous discovery comes as The Bulwark’s second, redemptive climax, and as Dreiser’s final triumph: the discovery by a master writer of a language without words.

      INTRODUCTION

      "The time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land."

      In the presence of our Lord and of this assembly, I, Solon Barnes, take Benecia Wallin to be my wife, promising, with divine assistance, to be unto her a loving and faithful husband until death shall separate us.

      In the presence of our Lord and of this assembly, I, Benecia Wallin, take Solon Barnes to be my husband, promising, with divine assistance, to be unto him a loving and faithful wife until death shall separate us.

      These solemn words, spoken in the profoundly still interior of the Friends' meetinghouse at Dukla, Pennsylvania, on a bright midweek morning m June, late in the nineteenth century, were heard by as many as a hundred persons—relatives and friends of the contracting parties.

      Yet, as anyone familiar with the history and traditions of Quakerism could see at a glance, times had changed since those days when the customs and beliefs binding and regulating the members of this highly spiritual organization were still strong enough to enforce not only the traditional Quaker habit but also a dignity of demeanor worthy of the ever present consciousness in the body and mind of everyone of the Inner Light. That light was presumably to each the indwelling consciousness of the Divine Creative Spirit, the true union of God with human beings, His children.

      Although a moderate proportion of the men and women present were arrayed in a modification of that earlier costume and manner, many of the others were more modern in aspect, even though they were far from having adopted the current fashions.

      The older men were beardless, and most of them retained the simple dress of their predecessors, the roll-less coat collar and smooth, pocketless coat front and round, wide-brimmed black hat; the women of the older group wore the traditional plain Quaker bonnet and sober black cape or shawl, over a full, ankle-length gray skirt, and gray bodice with white neckerchief—favoring, in addition, a very plain, broad, flat shoe and very small gray stringlike ribbons under their chins, to keep their bonnets on. If there were no smart suits or dresses as we understand the term today, neither were there any dull or slovenly modifications of them.

      On the other hand the younger of both sexes, in many instances, had gone so far in their concession to the enormous spirit of change and modernity that had overwhelmed Quakerism as to lay aside almost entirely those outward signs of an inward and spiritual grace.

      Regardless of how a very material world might ignore the fact, God—present to them as the Inner Light—was still an ever present help and guide. Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him. Along with this had continued in the minds of some of them a certain earnestness and thrift in well-being and social position, a marked practicality paralleling the very powerful ideal which they, or at least their forebears, had sought to realize. Among other things this had already caused most of them to conclude that the formalistic dress of their elders was a handicap and not quite in the spirit of that stout founder of the Quaker faith, George Fox. For he had said nothing about a uniform. On the contrary he had merely stressed simplicity in dress.

      At the same time this very practicality had in the main served to weaken the Society, to take it out of that idealism and pressing after perfection in a none too perfect world which had so impressed governments and peoples in the beginning. Life at best is but a rough and imperfect balance struck between many things, and the Quakers had striven so earnestly and so beautifully to achieve a true balance without flaw or shadow or error. George Fox had written:

      "Now the Lord hath opened to me by His invisible power how that every man was enlightened by the Divine Light of Christ, and I saw it shine through all. And they that believed it came out of the condemnation and came by the light of life, and became the children of it; but they that hated it and did not believe in it were condemned by it, though they made a profession of Christ."

      However, the ideal conceived by him had come up against the ordinary routine materiality of the world, with its lusts and deprivations and cares and inequalities. Indeed from the beginning the small mind and the small heart had wrestled with it in vain, whereas the dreamers and poets of Quakerism seized upon it with understanding. In the days of George Fox it was as in Italy when St. Francis walked abroad. Many sought to realize a great ideal. But later came the tempter. In the heat of the day, under the burden of the cares of life, many had fallen into easier ways. To them the method and appearance were much, the spirit little.

      So here in this simple meetinghouse, with its brown exterior, its whited walls, the sun shimmering down upon the June grass without, one could perceive the lag of a great ideal. A formal man could sit here in the ordered dignity of the church, rise and make moving remarks upon that light which leadeth to perfection, and still go forth into the ordinary ways of life, and there as a builder of ships, a keeper of stores, an officer of banks and corporations, or worker in any field, scarcely retain more than a thin formalistic trace of all that Fox had believed and dreamed.

      Out in the world, he was nearly the same as any other man. Only within the bosom of the family, in the precincts of the meetinghouse, or to each other, were the traditional thee and thy used. The much contemned hat honor of an earlier day (the refusal to remove the hat before any man or earthly power), against which so many Friends had protested, had long since been abolished.

      As for dancing, singing, music, the theater, show in dress, books and pictures of an entertaining or free character, and any undue accumulation of wealth—all were professedly against these. Yet, even as to these, there were exceptions. There were many Quakers, long since successful in commercial ways, whose homes contained books, prints, and objects of art, some even music. And yet, in spite of these things, even they still adhered, in thought at least, to a kind of simplicity of deportment and spareness in luxury.

      So here in this gathering—among the comparatively wealthy and well-placed relatives of the bride on the one hand, and on the other, among the less aristocratic friends and relatives of the bridegroom—might have been seen many examples of various shades of feeling and practice in connection with Quaker thought and custom that had surrounded the youth of Solon Barnes.

      PART ONE

      1

      Solon Barnes's parents, Rufus and Hannah Barnes, had not been wealthy—far from it. Rufus Barnes had been for some years before and after Solon's birth a combination of small farmer and tradesman near Segookit, Maine. His farm, on the very edge of Segookit, on which he raised quite large and salable crops of both hay and oats, to say nothing of his own vegetables and fruit, had enabled him finally to take over a somewhat dilapidated hay, grain, and feed store near the center of the town. Well thought of by his fellow Friends of that region and personally, as well as religiously, acceptable to others, he had made out sufficiently well to permit him to send Solon, his first-born and only son, and Cynthia, his only daughter, to the small Friends' school of that area, which they attended up to their tenth and eighth years respectively, at which time the problem of a higher education for both had arisen.

      At about that time, however, Solon's uncle, Anthony Kimber, had died. After his marriage to Hannah Barnes's sister, he had moved with his wife and two daughters from the Segookit region to Trenton, New Jersey, where he engaged in the pottery business. Now Phoebe Kimber appealed to Solon's father, Rufus, to come to Trenton and advise her in connection with the interest which her husband had acquired in the Trenton pottery, to say nothing of a house and some farm mortgages in the growing area between Trenton and Philadelphia.

      The extreme affection which had always existed between these two sisters, Mrs. Kimber and Mrs. Barnes, the joy and peace they found in each other's company, as well as Rufus's own liking for both Kimber and his wife, had prompted him to undertake this labor, even though at considerable trouble and expense to himself, for during his absence he was compelled to employ a Segookit Friend to look after his business. Yet the result had eventually proved much more agreeable and profitable than he had anticipated. For his brother-in-law's share in the Trenton pottery, owing to an especial aptitude he had had for the work, had resulted in a third interest then valued at forty-five thousand dollars. He had also had a salary which permitted him to invest in several mortgages on farms lying between Trenton and Philadelphia, which, since the region was growing in population, promised a definite rise in value. One of these, a rather large piece of property, was due to be foreclosed, an action which Kimber had already begun at the time of his death, and that now Rufus, sincerely seeking the best interests of his sister-in-law and her children, and knowing her lack of business ability of any kind, had decided, if possible, to carry out. Either by process of rental or sale, it could, along with the rest of the investments, yield sufficient income to permit her and her two children to live in the home they had thus far occupied.

      This service of Rufus's was destined to affect his personal life and interests and those of his son and daughter as much if not more than it did those of Mrs. Kimber and her two children. For Phoebe Kimber, although Rufus was by no means commercially the equal of her departed husband, because of the intense emotional, blood, and religious bond between Hannah Barnes and herself, and her personal and religious respect for her brother-in-law, was most anxious to strengthen this family bond rather than to weaken it in any way.

      For Rufus, as all who knew him gladly conceded, was honest and well intentioned toward all. He had accumulated the little that he had by hard labor and honest dealings. And although he had a small business and a farm of his own to look after, Phoebe had long noted, during their respective visits to each other and in their regular exchange of letters, that Rufus found time not only to attend to his own religious duties but, in connection with his neighbors and fellow Friends, to seek to maintain an amicable accord, as well as an exchange of social service, which had commended him to all those who knew him. As an evidence of this he was already, at the age of forty, an elder in the Segookit meeting, sitting each First-day (the Friends' appellation for Sunday), along with the male and female ministers and elders of the meeting, on one of two rows of elevated seats which faced the attenders. And, in the Barnes home, as in many another in that region, the fire of faith was ever alight.

      Solon and Cynthia Barnes, the children, never ate a meal which did not begin with a hush of thanksgiving, and, apart from that, no day was ever begun without a family gathering at which Mrs. Barnes read a chapter of the Bible, which was followed by a weighty silence. And these silences were, more than these children truly knew, important features of their subsequent viewpoint. However, at the time, Solon and his sister Cynthia were too young to do much more than wonder. Nonetheless it was the social and religious atmosphere as a whole at that time that permanently imbued Solon and Cynthia so that neither, to the end of their days, ever doubted the truth of the Divine Creative Presence in everyone, by reason of which all things lived and moved and had their being—the Guiding Inner Light or Divine Presence to which everyone could turn in an hour of doubt or stress or human confusion and find, ever present there, help and comfort.

      So Phoebe Kimber saw in Rufus Barnes a truly worthy character advising her to the best of his ability as to the disposition or personal control of her property and telling her that, in case she felt herself incapable of handling all the details, he would be glad to advise her from time to time, even Coming down from Maine to do so, difficult as it might be for him to leave his business there.

      At this point Phoebe said to him one day: Rufus, would thee not think of selling thy business and farm in Segookit and moving here? Thee sees how I am placed here with my two girls. Anthony was of great help, as thee knows, in advising and directing them as well as me. I was thinking that if thee and Hannah were here in Trenton instead of in Segookit, thee and she could help me so much in all these matters and maybe I could help thee. For, besides, as thee can see for thyself, there are ample means for all of us, particularly if thee were here to manage for us. I know thee has that farm and business in Segookit, but here, as thee sees is this house, besides that other large one on that farm near Dukla which Anthony thought advisable to foreclose. Now if thee would come and take that large house and farm for thyself and Hannah, say—that is, if thee and she would not prefer to come here and live with us, why—I have been thinking—thee might find it to thine and Hannah's and thy children's, particularly Solon's, advantage, as they grow up, as well as mine. For thee sees how prosperous Trenton is. And the schools near here and in Philadelphia, if not the meeting places, offer advantages which Hannah has always missed in Segookit. Besides, now that Anthony is gone, I have the feeling that I shall not ever wish to marry again, and so thee might not find it too difficult or unprofitable to take care of us all. For, as to that, I would make any arrangement thee thought fit or best for thee and Hannah and thy children, for thee knows how much I care for all of you.

      She paused while Rufus contemplated her in silence. Looking at Mrs. Kimber, a still fairly young and pleasing, as well as attractive, woman, he was puzzled not a little by the varying aspects of this offer. For it involved obligations as well as advantages. For one thing, although Phoebe and Hannah were devoted to each other, still, when it came to the matter of joining two families under one roof, he was dubious as to that and wondered how Hannah would view it, let alone Phoebe, after a time. For it involved, as he knew, the problem of peacefully and happily controlling the conduct of two pair of children, who, thrown together constantly, might occasionally quarrel. And which mother was to decide what? And in whose favor? No. That would not do. And so he proceeded most thoughtfully to explain why at best he would have to return to Segookit and talk with Hannah.

      As for his taking over the house and sixty-acre farm near Dukla, which he had already seen, and really restoring that large square two-story frame dwelling, set among tall dark cedars, and with a once quite handsome overreaching Florentine roof, that was another problem. It had been a mansion once occupied by a pre-Civil War family of some distinction bearing the name of Thornbrough. It was quite evident that they had had money in their day, for there was a considerable portion of a tall ornate iron fence about the place. Also there was a semicircular driveway which, through one wide gate on the left as you faced the house, permitted entrance by carriage to a long front porch in the center of which was a wide and side-glass-framed oak door, the four main panels of which displayed well-carved bouquets of wooden flowers. The woodwork throughout the house, as Rufus, acting as executor for Mrs. Kimber, had also carefully noted, was in an excellent state of preservation, but where injured or marred, it would be expensive to repair. There were a number of glass chandeliers and some decorations at the center which once held candles but would have to be replaced by electric fixtures. The wood-burning stoves in the principal rooms would have to be replaced by a furnace. The present occupants—a crude and seemingly industrious but none too intelligent farmer, his wife, and five children, had, as Rufus heard, inherited the property from a deceased father. They were now anxious to leave, however, and seek work in the city, having been unable by their associated efforts to make the farm yield them a living, plus the taxes and the interest on the mortgage which had fallen into the hands of Anthony Kimber.

      2

      Far more important than the interior of the Thornbrough property, which Rufus had merely glanced at, was the size and state of the house grounds, to say nothing of the adjoining sixty acres of farming land of which the former were but a very small part. The acres themselves were truly interesting because it was evident, as Rufus had quickly noted, that with any intelligent system of crop rotation they could be made to yield large crops of whatever the local market required, a fact which he intended to take advantage of as soon as he could, providing he took the place and could find the right help with which to replace the present occupant.

      Meanwhile, as for the house and grounds themselves, he proposed to explain to Phoebe the difficulties of the situation and to see whether some of the free money left by Kimber might be devoted to this purpose. His argument in this case was that if he and Hannah were to occupy it, it must be put in some livable order. Or if he were to sell this entire property, which was his first thought, and obtain any profit out of it for Phoebe and her children, it certainly would have to be put in some such order as would commend it to any buyer who might desire so large a residence. And that would take money. So it was that at last, after returning to the old house and going over it carefully—each nook and cranny—he returned to Phoebe to say that, while the place had possibilities, it was obvious, after consulting, as he had, with first one and then another real estate dealer of the area and looking at various types of old houses which had been repaired and sold or occupied by various Philadelphia families of means, that such repair work would be quite expensive. Yet in all probability it would prove profitable to her.

      Furthermore, his thought was that if she were in earnest about his transferring himself and his family to this new world, the most inexpensive and yet by no means disagreeable thing to him or Hannah would be for him to take the place for himself and get a new farm laborer to look after the farm under his direction. Next they would take as small a portion of the house as he and Hannah and the children could do with, and, with the aid of competent laborers, put that in order until such time as the farm earned enough money to warrant the old mansion's more general restoration—a suggestion which caused Phoebe to re-emphasize what she had previously indicated: that the property was his to do with as he chose, since she intended to will it to him and Hannah. Also that she was ready and pleased for him to use such money of hers as would restore it,

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