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"I don't think she is very considerate," Mrs. Thornton hinted. Maud treated her at times with toleration. The doctor understood what that meant her lack of sympathy with her mother's clinging to her family; deluging the Thornton house with Ellwells and their affairs. "If she would only cultivate some serious interests, yours, and take the place of a son," thus Mrs.
"Yes, I have known all the Ellwells except these young people. I was just out of Camberton when the war broke out. John Ellwell shirked then; it was not much to do to go to the front. It was in the air to fight." He paused to let this aspect of the case sink in. "Later I was chairman of the committee that requested him to leave the Tremont Club.
The verandas broke down; grass and hardy roses grew into the cracks where the clap-boards had started. The Ellwells, father and son, were fashionable people; the family had developed. Early in the seventies there came rumors of young Ellwell's disgrace in the Tremont Club. He was detected cheating at play, and left the club, of which Mark Ellwell was vice-president.
The Ellwells came in town for the winter, living in a flat at one of the new hotels near by. Mrs. Thornton had the habit of spending her mornings in the flat with her mother and the baby. Thornton could find no reasonable grounds for the rebellion he felt over this tie, this close proximity to decay in which he was compelled to live.
The Ellwells had kept the old Four Corners in Middleton long after the family had moved out into the wider world of Boston, and from farming and the ministry had entered the spheres of commerce and money-owning. In the time of old Roper Ellwell the Four Corners had been the parsonage for Middleton, and there first the Rev.
After athletics and carts had been talked out there was not much to start fresh conversation with. Camberton slipped away, with its endless problems, its ambitious prods. Jarvis Thornton entered another atmosphere when the cart crunched the gravel of the drive at the Four Corners. The Ellwells were on the veranda. "Who are the Ellwells?"
"Don't let me scare you, young man," he said, with his regulation courtesy, the air of the old Ellwells. Thornton shook hands with him, noticing his bloodshot eyes, the puffy folds under the eyelids, the general bloat of an ill-regulated human animal. "Are you going before dinner?" Ellwell continued. Thornton murmured something about duties and engagements. Ellwell bowed and lifted his hat.
"One of them was the old pastor in the Second Church, and his grandson is on the stock board now." The older man nodded. Then he continued, describing his first introduction to the family, his impression of the Four Corners, his first visit there, with clear, simple portraits of the various Ellwells of this generation.
That was the end of the Ellwells in old Boston. Mark Ellwell never came back. "The old man is done with me." That had been John's comment to his wife. And well might Mark Ellwell be done with him; there was not much left for another clearing up. There were the Four Corners, and his seat in the Board, and then beggary.
So in the third generation the Ellwells established themselves once more in Middleton at the Four Corners.
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