it was designed
as a sort of monument to his personal success. He had not left the East
to be a failure, or to remain inconspicuous. His contractor--or his
architect, if one had been employed--had imagined a heavy, square affair
of dull-red brick, with brown-stone trimmings in heavy courses. Items: a
high basement, an undecorated mansard in slate; a big, clumsy pair of
doors, set in the middle of all, at the top of a heavily balustraded
flight of brown-stone steps; one vast window on the right of the doors
to light the "parlor," and another like it, on the left, to light the
"library": a facade reared before any allegiance to "periods," and in a
style best denominated local or indigenous. Jehiel was called a
capitalist and had a supplementary office in the high front basement;
and here he was fretting by himself, off and on, in 1873; and here he
continued to fret by himself, off and on, until 1880, when he fretted
himself from earth. He was an unhappy man, with no essential mastery of
life. His wife existed somewhere upstairs. They seldom spoke--indeed
seldom met--unless papers to shift the units of a perplexed estate were
up for consideration. Sometimes her relatives stole into the house to
see her and hoped, with fearfulness, not to meet her husband in some
passageway. He himself had plenty of relatives, by blood as well as by
marriage; too many of these were rascals, and they kept him busy. The
town, in the seventies, was at the adventurous, formative stage; almost
everybody was leaving the gravel walks of Probity to take a short cut
across the fair lawns of Success, and the social landscape was a good
deal cut up and disfigured.

"Poor relations!"--such was Jehiel's brief, scornful rating of the less
capable among these supernumeraries. A poor relation represented, to
him, the lowest form of animal life.

And when the chicane and intrigue of the more clever among them roused
his indignation he would exclaim: "They're putting me through the
smut-machine!"--an ignominious, exasperating treatment which he refused
to undergo without loud protests. These protests often reduced his wife
to trembling and to tears. At such times she might hide an elder
sister--one on the pursuit of some slight dole--in a small back bedroom,
far from sight and hearing.

An ugly house, inhabited by unhappy people. Perhaps I should brighten
things by bringing forward, just here, Elsie, Jehiel's beautiful
granddaughter. But he had no grandd