Alston Choate had got her a divorce years ago and then
married her. "Come," she said, with an undiminished sweetness, "I'll
take you to your room."

VIII

Addington, so Jeffrey Blake remembered when he came home to it, was a
survival. Naive constancies to custom, habits sprung out of old
conditions and logical no more, and even the cruder loyalties to the
past, lived in it unchanged. This was as his mind conceived it. His
roots had gone deeper here than he knew while he was still a part of it,
a free citizen. The first months of his married life had been spent
here, but as his prosperity burned the more brilliantly, he and Esther
had taken up city life in winter, and for the summer had bought a large
and perfectly equipped house in a colony at the shore. That, in the
crash of his fortunes, had gone with other wreckage, and now he never
thought of it with even a momentary regret. It belonged to that fevered
time when he was always going fast and faster, as if life were a
perpetual speeding in a lightning car. But of Addington he did think, in
the years that were so much drear space for reflection, and though he
felt no desire to go back, the memory of it was cool and still. The town
had distinct social strata, the happier, he felt, in that. There were
the descendants of old shipbuilders and merchants who drew their
sufficient dividends and lived on the traditions of times long past. All
these families knew and accepted one another. Their peculiarities were
no more to be questioned than the eccentric shapes of clouds. The
Daytons, who were phenomenally ugly in a bony way, were the Daytons.
Their long noses with the bulb at the base were Dayton noses. The
Madisons, in the line of male descent from distinguished blood, drank
to an appalling extent; but they were Madisons, and you didn't interdict
your daughters' marrying them. The Mastertons ate no meat, and didn't
believe in banks. They kept their money in queer corners, and there was
so much of it that they couldn't always remember where, and the
laundress had orders to turn all stockings before wetting, and did
indeed often find bills in the toe. But the laundress, being also of
Addington, though of another stratum, recognised this as a Masterton
habit, and faithfully sought their hoarded treasure for them, and
delivered it over with the accuracy of an accountant. She wouldn't have
seen how the Mastertons could help having money in their clothes unless
they sho