it— to Ben. And the conviction which Eugene had had at Ben’s death, more than a year and a half before, was now a materialized certainty. The great wild pattern of the family had been broken forever. The partial discipline that had held them together had been destroyed by the death of their brother: the nightmare of waste and loss had destroyed their hope. With an insane fatalism they had surrendered to the savage chaos of life.
Except for Eliza. She was sixty, sound of body and mind, triumphantly healthy. She still ran Dixieland, but she had given up the boarders for roomers, and most of the duties of management she intrusted to an old maid who lived in the house. Eliza devoted most of her time to real estate.
She had, during the past year, got final control of Gant’s property. She had begun to sell it immediately and ruthlessly, over his indifferent mutter of protest. She had sold the old house on Woodson Street for $7, 000—a good enough price, she had said, considering the neighborhood. But, stark, bare, and raw, stripped of its girdling vines, annex now to a quack’s sanitarium for “nervous diseases,” the rich labor of their life was gone. In this, more than in anything else, Eugene saw the final disintegration of his family.
Eliza had also sold a wild tract of mountain farmland for $6, 000, fifty acres on the Reynoldsville road for $15, 000, and several smaller pieces. Finally she had sold Gant’s shop upon the Square for $25, 000 to a syndicate of real estate people who were going to erect on the site the town’s first “skyscraper.” With this money as capital, she began to “trade,” buying, selling, laying down options, in an intricate and bewildering web.
“Dixieland” itself had become enormously valuable. The street which she had foreseen years before had been cut through behind her boundaries: she lacked thirty feet of meeting the golden highway, but she had bought the intervening strip, paying without complaint a stiff price. Since then she had refused, with a puckered smile, an offer of $100, 000 for her property.
She was obsessed. She talked real estate unendingly. She spent half her time talking to real estate men; they hovered about the house like flesh-flies. She drove off with them several times a day to look at property. As her land investments grew in
