but a
seedy, middle-aged clerk, none too careful of his appearance and
uneasily aware of his failure, had ample excuse to himself for his
shortcomings and willingness to live on a kind Government, because he
had been hardly used by fate in the matter of his inheritance. As the
property that might have been his was just beyond his reach, he had a
small swagger of superiority in the gas office, and the tradition was
well established there that he belonged to a family "land poor,"--the
most genteel form of poverty if any form of poverty can be genteel. Even
old farmer Samuel had tottered about the Square on his malacca stick and
exchanged the time of day with the small merchants there, with a sense
of his own importance as the owner of "a valuable piece of property"
temporarily under legal disability.

As for the women of the family this sense of unrealized importance grew
tenfold in their consciousness, because they had few opportunities of
encountering reality in their narrow lives and because as women they
were apt to dream of wealth, even of visionary wealth. It cannot be said
that Clark's Field had much to do with John's marriage which had taken
place in 'sixty-seven, because at that early date it was not considered
a large expectation even by the Clarks. But John had a younger sister,
Ada or "Addie" Clark as she was always known, and over Addie's destiny
Clark's Field had a large and sinister influence as I shall presently
show. At the time when her father finally abandoned his farm in favor of
town life, Addie was a mere child, so young that she could forget the
wholesome pictures of domestic farm industry that she must have shared.
Or, if there lingered in the background of her memory a consciousness of
her mother's butter-making, feeding the pigs, cooking for the occasional
farm hands, washing and mending, and all the other common tasks of this
laborious condition, she conveniently ignored it as women easily
contrive to do. Her life was centered in the Church Street house where
the Clarks had at first indulged in certain pretensions. Addie had gone
to the Alton schools and there associated with the better class of
children,--a doctor's daughter and a retired bank clerk's family being
the more intimate of these. As a young girl she had a transparent
complexion and a thin sort of American prettiness that unfortunately
quickly faded, under the influences of the Church Street house, into a
sallow commonplaceness. But