And Potts,
having served his purpose, had been neatly removed. I have said that the
Potts-troubled waters of Little Arcady were for the moment stilled. By
the hands of the gods had they been mercifully stilled so that not for a
month had any citizen been asked to subscribe for any improving book or
patented device of culture.
A month before, in a far-off place, J. Rodney Potts had suffered
extinction through the apparently casual agency of a moving railway
train, the intervention of the gods in all such matters being discreetly
veiled so that the denser of us shall suspect nothing but that they were
the merest of accidents.
One could only surmise that the widow viewed this happening with a kind
of trustful resignation, sweetened perhaps by certain ancient memories
attuned to a gentle melancholy. I know that she placed on view in her
parlor for the first time a crayon portrait of Potts in his early
manhood, one made ere life had broken so many of its promises to him,
the portrait of one who might conceivably have enchained the fancy of
even a superior woman. But the widow was not publicly anguished. She
donned a gown and bonnet of black in testimony of her bereavement, but
there was no unnecessary flaunt of crape in her decently symbolic garb.
Pages:
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178