Addie unlike the men of the family never
wholly abandoned her aspirations and ambitions. She was very careful
about the young men whom she "encouraged," and the families into whose
houses she would enter. Thus she sacrificed her slim chances of
matrimony on the altar of a visionary family pride. One of her
high-school mates, the son of the prosperous liveryman in Alton, might
have married her had he been more warmly met, and taken her with him to
Detroit, where in time he became the well-to-do head of a large
automobile manufactory. This was not the single instance of her family
pride.

It is a fascinating subject to speculate what would have happened to Ada
if she had had the moral vigor to shake herself loose from the hampering
family traditions of riches to be, and struck out for an independent,
wholesome life as women have been known to do under similar
circumstances. But Alton, like most old towns, had strong class
traditions that exercised an iron influence upon feminine destinies. It
was, of course, hopeless for Ada, the daughter of a retired farmer who
could not sell his farm, to come into close social contact with the
local aristocracy, which consisted at this time of the Stearns and Frost
relationship together with a few well-to-do merchants from B---- who had
always lived in Alton and owned those large semi-suburban estates in its
environs. But at least she could jealously guard herself from falling
into the mire of the commoner sort of small shopkeepers who were
pressing into the Square. The end was that Addie fast became what was
then called, without any circumlocution, an "old maid," and an
uninteresting one, whose days were occupied by church and gossip, and
who went over and over the threadbare family tradition. Old Mrs. Clark,
her mother, was a realist and never forgot the farm days. She was enough
of a woman to regret sincerely the fatal mistake that the family had
made in trying to become something other than their destiny had fitted
them to be. She was a thorn in the sentimental flesh of Addie, whose
thoughts preferred to play with the dignities and ease that would be
hers when the Field had been sold. Addie dressed herself as finely as
she could on Sundays and in the afternoons would walk down the South
Road past the abandoned Field and remark to a friend upon the family
property and the misfortune that kept them all down in the depths of
poverty. As the years went on and the price of real estate ad