nd making beds and
counting out the wash and making up the bills, with or without school.
But the liveryman hinted to her on her return from the funeral that she
ought to go immediately to some friend's house, or have some married
woman stay with her until her future had been determined upon. Adelle
knew of no house where she could make such a visit, nor of any one whom
she could invite to stay with her. It may seem incredible, as it did to
Mr. Lovejoy, that "folks could live all their lives in Alton like the
Clarks" and have no relatives or friends to lean upon in an emergency.
But the truth is that when a family begins to go down in this world,
after having some pretensions, it is likely to shed social relations
very fast instead of acquiring new ones. A family in a settled social
equilibrium (rarely the case in America), or one that is going up in the
human scale, is apt to acquire connections, quite apart from the
accidents of birth and social gifts, because the mental attitude is an
open and optimistic one, attracting to itself humanity instead of
timidly withdrawing into itself. Strength attracts and weakness repels
in the long run here as elsewhere. The Clarks, who had never been
considerable or numerous, had in the course of three generations
gradually lost their hold upon the complex threads of life, shiftlessly
shedding relationships as the Veteran had done, or proudly refusing
inferior connections as Addie had, until the family was left solitary in
the person of this one fifteen-year-old girl, in whom the social habit
seemed utterly atrophied. Of course, Adelle could have appealed to her
aunt's pastor, but it never occurred to her to do that or to make use of
any other social machinery. She went back to the Church Street house,
occupied her old room, and for the next few days continued the catlike
routine of her life as nearly as she could under the changed conditions.

Mr. Lovejoy, who continued to be the one most concerned in her welfare,
induced her to write a crude little note to the "Washington Trust
Company, Dear Sirs," notifying them of the demise of her aunt. The
livery-stable man, who was a widower and not beyond middle age, which
does not necessarily mean in his class that the wife is dead and buried,
but merely permanently absent for one reason or another, might have
thrown sentimental eyes upon the girl if she had been different, more of
a woman.

"She'll likely enough be an heiress some of these