CHAPTER II


As we ambled towards the sun, which was setting over old Harpeth, the
tallest humpbacked hill on Paradise Ridge, the Greek battle raged on the
front seat and there was peace with anxiety in the back of the ancestral
coach.

As the wheels and the two old gentlemen rumbled and the Bird's family
clucked and crooned, with only an occasional irritated squawk, I, for the
first time since the landslide of our fortune, began to take real thought
of the morrow.

"Yes, landslide is a good name for what is happening to us, and I hope
we'll slide or land on the home base, whatever is the correct term in the
national game that Matthew has given up trying to teach me to enjoy," I
said to myself as I settled down to look into our situation.

I found that it was not at all astonishing that father had lost all the
fortune that my mother had left him and me when she died three years ago.
It was astonishing that the old dreamer had kept it as long as he had, and
it was only because most of it had been in land and he had from the first
lived serenely and comfortably on nice flat slices of town property cut off
whenever he needed it. He had been a dreamer when he came out of the
University of Virginia ten years after the war, and it had been the tragedy
of Uncle Cradd's life that he had not settled down with him on the very
broad, but very poor, ancestral acres of Elmnest, to slice away with him at
that wealth instead of letting himself be captured in all his poetic beauty