probably some mothers with
marriageable daughters on their hands were wrung by pangs of envy, when
Dallam Wybrant and Eleanor Millsap slipped away one day to Memphis and
there were married.

As Eleanor Millsap, self-reliant, self-sufficient and latterly
self-supporting, the girl through the years had steadily been growing
out of the domestic orbit which bounded the lives of her parents. As
Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, bride of an up-and-coming business man, with an
assured social position and wealth--as our town measured wealth--in his
own name she was now to pass entirely beyond their humble horizon and
vanish out of their narrowed social ken. True enough, they kept right on
living, all three of them, in the same town and indeed upon paralleling
and adjacent streets; only the parents lived in their shabby little
sealed-up coffin box of a house down at the poorer end of Yazoo Street;
the daughter, in her handsome new stucco house, as formal and slick as a
wedding cake, up at the aristocratic head of Chickasaw Drive. And yet to
all intents and purposes they were as far apart, these two Millsaps and
their only child, as though they abode in different countries. For she,
mind you, had been taken up by the best people. But none of the best
people had the least intention of taking up her father and mother as
well. She probably was as far from expecting it or desiring it as any
other could be. In fact a tale ran about that she served notice upon her
parents that thereafter their lives were to run in different grooves.
They were not to seek to see her without her permission; she did not
mean to see them except when and where she chose, or if she chose--and
she did not choose.

One evening--it might have been about a year and a half after the
marriage of his daughter--Felix Millsap was on his way home from work, a
middle-aged figure, moving with the clunking gait of a tired laborer who
wears cheap, heavy shoes, his broad splayed hands dangling at the ends
of his arms as though in either of them he carried an invisible weight.
It had been a hot day, and where he had been toiling on a roof shed
which required reshingling the sun had blazed down upon him until it
sucked his strength out of him, leaving him limp and draggy. He walked
with his head down, indifferent in his sweated weariness to things about
him. All the same, the motorman on the Belt Line car swinging out of
Yazoo Street into Commercial should have sounded his gong for the