l of Alton, the
Second Congregational Church, and the new City Hall, the interior of the
Washington Trust Company, with its bronze and marble and windows that
shed soft violet lights on the white floors, awakened an unknown
appetite for richness and splendor, color and size. That was what she
had been thinking about without realizing it while the trust officer
talked to her aunt. She called this barbaric profusion of rich materials
"pretty," and felt, very faintly, a personal happiness in being
connected with it in some slight manner.

VIII

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