If the excursions to the probate court and the trust company had roused
expectations of change in their condition, they were to be disappointed.
From that afternoon when they turned into Church Street on their return
from the Washington Trust Company, the monotony and drudgery of their
former life settled down on them with an even greater insistence. The
dusty ROOMS FOR RENT sign was tucked into the front window with its
usual regularity, for do what she could, Mrs. Clark could not attain
that pinnacle of the landlady's aspirations, a houseful of permanent
roomers. The young men were inconstant, the middle-aged liable to
matrimony, the old to death, and all to penury or change of occupation
and residence. So the old fight went on as before during all the
twenty-three years of the widow Clark's married life,--a fight to exist
in a dusty, worn, and shabby fashion, with a file of roomers tramping
out the stair carpet, spotting the furniture, and using up the linen. To
be sure, two great drains upon income no longer troubled her,--Clark's
Field and the Veteran. With these encumbrances removed she could make
ends meet.
After a few weeks she forgot her doubts about the wisdom of following
Judge Orcutt's advice and placing her interest in the estate together
with her niece's in care of the trust company. The manager of the
livery-stable, who was the nearest thing to permanency the house knew,
shook his head over her folly in trusting a trust company, but the
speculators and their lawyers let her severely alone, knowing that they
had been outwitted and flitting to other schemes. The Square seemed to
accept the fresh eclipse of the Clark estate after its false appearance
of coming to a crisis. And the character of the Square was fast changing
with all else these busy years. It was no longer a neighborhood center
of gossip. There were new faces--and many foreign ones--in the rows of
shops. The neighborhood was deteriorating, or evolving, as you happened
to look at it.
The Washington Trust Company seemed to have quite forgotten the
existence of the Clark women except for the occasional appearance in the
mail of an oblong letter addressed in type to Mrs. Ellen Trigg Clark,
which bore in its upper left-hand corner a neat vignette of the trust
building. Adelle studied these envelopes carefully, not to say tenderly,
with something of the emotion that the trust company's home had roused
in her the only time she had been within its doors. The vignette, which
represented a considerable Grecian temple, she thought "pretty," and the
neat, substantial-looking envelope suggested a rich importance to the
communication within that also pleased the girl. She knew that it had to
do with her remotely. Yet there was never anything thrilling in these
communications from the trust company. They were signed by Mr. Gardiner
and curtly informed Mrs. Clark of certain meaningless facts or more
often curtly inquired for information,--"Awaiting your kind reply,"
etc., or merely requested politely another example of the widow's
signature. They were models of brief, impersonal, business
communications. If Adelle had ever had any experience of personal
relationship she might have resented these perfunctory epistles from her
legal guardian, but for all she knew that was the way all people treated
one another. Evidently her legal guardian had no desire for any closer
personal contact with its ward, and she waited, not so much patiently as
pensively, for it to demonstrate a more lively interest in her
existence....
Meanwhile there was debate in the Church Street house about a matter
that more closely touched the young girl. She had graduated from the
Everitt School the preceding June and would naturally be going on now
into the high school with her better conditioned schoolmates. But she
herself, though not averse to school, had suggested that she should stay
at home and help her aunt in the house or find a place in one of the
shops in the Square where she might earn a little money. Mrs. Clark, who
has been described as a realist, might have favored this practical plan,
had it not been that Adelle was a Clark--all that was left of them, in
fact. The widow had lived so long under the shadow of the Clark
expectations that she could not easily escape from their control now
that she was alone. A Trigg, of course, under similar circumstances
would have gone into a shop at once, but a Clark ought to have a better
education in deference to her expectations. The heiress of Clark's Field
must never conclude her education with the grades.... So finally it was
decided that Adelle should enter the high school for a year, at any
rate, and to that end a new school dress of sober blue serge was
provided, made by Adelle with her aunt's assistance.
These days Adelle rose at an early hour to do the chamber work while her
aunt got breakfast, then changed her dress, looked hurriedly over her
lessons, gobbled her breakfast, and with her books and a tin lunch-box
strapped together set forth to walk the mile and a half to the high
school in order to save car-fare. There she performed her daily tasks in
a perfunctory, dead manner, not uncommon. Once an exasperated teacher
had demanded testily,--
"Miss Clark, don't you ever think?"