ad 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 London mansion
filled with the best that g