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Updated: June 19, 2025
He was clever, wicked perhaps, but so clever that he always got into good things. The conclusion came shortly. For the last six months Ellwell had managed to keep up the interest; now he had come to the end of his rope, and he was about to commit suicide by selling his seat in order to provide a pittance, at least, for his sisters. Husband and wife sat silent for a long time.
"You have an uncle in Minnesota," Mrs. Ellwell repeated, mechanically, her dry eyes staring idealess at him. "You are very, very kind." She rose and walked into the house. "Fool," Ruby muttered; her dark face flamed up angrily. Thornton noticed how much she resembled her handsome father. She had more fire in her than Roper second. "I suppose he hadn't pluck enough to come home with his own story.
She followed without protest. She seemed to swim beside him, happy in elemental, very simple thoughts, a thin color flushing over her face. "We have been so happy. It has been such a long, full day. Will you ever come again?" They stood in the shadows on the lawn. He was minded to say, no, but as he took her hand the Ellwell carriage drove up the country road. After glancing at it she blanched.
It gave her father a wicked pleasure to see her snub young Roper Bradley when he came with his mother to make their annual summer visit. She never mentioned her uncle Roper, and she extended compassion to the doctor on the subject of her grandfather Ellwell. The doctor was fond of her in spite of his analysis. He thought with pride that she was thoroughbred, capable of masterly strokes.
Then Roper Ellwell was called by the Second Church, in Boston, to be their pastor. This was the beginning of the Ellwell family in the good society of New England.
The Middleton people, driving by at night within sound of the noise when the Four Corners was garishly lit, would repeat the family story and recall old Roper Ellwell, who lay in a green mound near his first church. But the broker, the "village magnate," as his daughters called him, was generous and free-handed in the parish.
Their refusal to have anything to do with their brother had been one fruitful topic of family discussion. A few years before, however, when American stocks were booming, the two maiden ladies had withdrawn their hundred thousand from the woollen mill where old Mr. Ellwell had placed it, and had given it to the stock-broker for reinvestment. Their brother had always fascinated them.
Ruby had already begun the period of over-bloom. The Bradleys, he gathered, lived a kind of a tramp existence, moving from boarding-house to hotel as Bradley went up or down. And Ruby, with all her assurance and her affluent person, had not lost the Ellwell ailments. Yet to her child had been given the strong stock he envied.
One more insult for her to accept, to be borne in stupid passivity. But for the daughter who had to live, it would be a different question; and by the time he had reached Middleton, he had not made up his mind how the tale was to be told. It was warm when he walked his horse over the gravelled drive at the Four Corners. Mrs. Ellwell and her elder daughter were sitting on the piazza sewing.
Later he had slipped away in the same quiet abstracted manner. For the rest of the day Jarvis Thornton had been a little sad, as well as bored, without knowing exactly why. They had planned a simple wedding for September; they would walk to the village church, the old white box of a meeting-house where the first Roper Ellwell had led his congregation.
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