as a pathetic projection of that which had
existed in my childhood; we had never been confidants then. The world
in which I lived and fought, of great transactions and merciless
consequences frightened her; her own world was more limited than ever.
She heard disquieting things, I am sure, from Cousin Robert Breck, who
had become more and more querulous since the time-honoured firm of Breck
and Company had been forced to close its doors and the home at Claremore
had been sold. My mother often spent the day in the scrolled suburban
cottage with the coloured glass front door where he lived with the
Kinleys and Helen....

If my mother suspected that I was anticipating marriage, and said
nothing, Nancy Durrett suspected and spoke out.

Life is such a curious succession of contradictions and surprises that
I record here without comment the fact that I was seeing much more
of Nancy since her marriage than I had in the years preceding it. A
comradeship existed between us. I often dined at her house and had
fallen into the habit of stopping there frequently on my way home in the
evening. Ham did not seem to mind. What was clear, at any rate, was that
Nancy, before marriage, had exacted some sort of an understanding by
which her "freedom" was not to be interfered with. She was the first
among us of the "modern wives."

Ham, whose heartstrings and purse-strings were oddly intertwined, had
stipulated that they were to occupy the old Durrett mansion; but when
Nancy had made it "livable," as she expressed it, he is said to have
remarked that he might as well have built a new house and been done with
it. Not even old Nathaniel himself would have recognized his home when
Nancy finished what she termed furnishing: out went the horsehair, the
hideous chandeliers, the stuffy books, the Recamier statuary, and an
army of upholsterers, wood-workers, etc., from Boston and New York
invaded the place. The old mahogany doors were spared, but matched now
by Chippendale and Sheraton; the new, polished floors were covered with
Oriental rugs, the dreary Durrett pictures replaced by good canvases and
tapestries. Nancy had what amounted to a genius for interior effects,
and she was the first to introduce among us the luxury that was to grow
more and more prevalent as our wealth increased by leaps and bounds.
Only Nancy's luxury, though lavish, was never vulgar, and her house
when completed had rather marvellously the fine distinction of some old
Lo