et
'round'? Why, you've got competition even among the churches. Yours,
where I believe you teach in the Sunday school, would go bankrupt if it
proclaimed real Christianity. And you'll go bankrupt if you practise it,
Perry, my boy. Some early, wide-awake, competitive, red-blooded bird will
relieve you of the Boyne Street car line."

It was one of this same new and "fittest" species who had already
relieved poor Mr. McAlery Willett of his fortune. Mr. Willett was a
trusting soul who had never known how to take care of himself or his
money, people said, and now that he had lost it they blamed him. Some had
been saved enough for him and Nancy to live on in the old house, with
careful economy. It was Nancy who managed the economy, who accomplished
remarkable things with a sum they would have deemed poverty in former
days. Her mother had died while I was at Cambridge. Reverses did not
subdue Mr. Willett's spirits, and the fascination modern "business" had
for him seemed to grow in proportion to the misfortunes it had caused
him. He moved into a tiny office in the Durrett Building, where he
appeared every morning about half-past ten to occupy himself with heaven
knows what short cuts to wealth, with prospectuses of companies in Mexico
or Central America or some other distant place: once, I remember, it was
a tea, company in which he tried to interest his friends, to raise in the
South a product he maintained would surpass Orange Pekoe. In the
afternoon between three and four he would turn up at the Boyne Club, as
well groomed, as spruce as ever, generally with a flower in his
buttonhole. He never forgot that he was a gentleman, and he had a
gentleman's notions of the fitness of things, and it was against his
principles to use, a gentleman's club for the furtherance of his various
enterprises.

"Drop into my office some day, Dickinson," he would say. "I think I've
got something there that might interest you!"

He reminded me, when I met him, that he had always predicted I would get
along in life....

The portrait of Nancy at this period is not so easily drawn. The decline
of the family fortunes seemed to have had as little effect upon her as
upon her father, although their characters differed sharply. Something of
that spontaneity, of that love of life and joy in it she had possessed in
youth she must have inherited from McAlery Willett, but these qualities
had disappeared in her long before the coming of financial reverse