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Updated: June 20, 2025
And when the big house went up a palace for a country town, though it only cost John Markley $25,000 he, who had been so reticent about his affairs in other years, tried to talk to his old friends of the house, telling them expansively that he was putting it up so that the town would have something in the way of a house for public gatherings; but he aroused no responsive enthusiasm, and long before the big opening reception his fervour had been quenched.
Isabel Markley knows how old she will be then. A thousand times she has counted it. To see our town of a summer twilight, with the families riding abroad behind their good old nags, under the overhanging elms that meet above our newly-paved streets, one would not think that there could exist in so lovely a place as miserable a creature as John Markley is; or as Isabel, his wife, for that matter.
Markley sent her husband, red necktied, high-hatted and tailor-made, to the train to meet the distinguished guest.
If John Markley was cross with her in that time and the neighbours say that he was; if he sat for hours in the house without saying a word, and grumbled and flew into a rage at the least ruffling of the domestic waters his wife kept her grief to herself, and even when she left town to visit her daughter in California no one knew what she knew.
As he did so, the door of the wooden building opened, giving a glimpse of the empty, idle shaft-mouth beyond, and a young man of about twenty-two or so entered. He was a mining student, employed as a level boss by Mr. Merrill. His employer looked up as he entered. "Well, Markley, any news?" "Why, sir, that arrant rascal, Pedro, just rode by.
It was never known how long he lay there unable to move one-half of his body, but his wife stood nearly an hour at the front door that night, and when she finally switched on the light, she and the man with her saw Markley lying before them with one eye shut and with half his face withered and dead, the other half around the open eye quivering with hate.
From a brassy street-gadding child of twelve, whose mother crowded her into grown-up society before she left the high school, and let her spell her name Ysabelle, she had grown into womanhood like a rank weed; had married at nineteen, was divorced at twenty-one, and having tried music teaching and failed, china painting and failed, she learned stenography by sheer force of her own will, with no instruction save that in her book, and opened an office for such work as she could get, while aiming for the best job in town the position of cashier and stenographer for the Markley Mortgage Company.
In the fall his party selected a new ward committeeman, and though Markley had been treasurer of the committee for a dozen years, his successor was named from the Worthington bank, and they had the grace not to come to Markley with the subscription-paper asking for money.
He went directly to John Markley's back office, got the check that Markley had given to Handy, dictated a letter in the anteroom of Markley's office to a Kansas City plate-maker, inclosed fifty dollars as he passed the draft counter, and, as he swung by the post-office he mailed the Handy check with instructions to have ten photographic half-tone cuts made of the check and mailed back to Hedrick in four days.
What do the public care whether he is dreaming or whether he is drunk? What does Hannah care? Why, they don't care a cent. Now, do they? "'Not a red cent. "'Of course not. And yet Markley sends me another poem, entitled "Despondency," in which he exclaims,
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