so she had always been even in the memory of people considered old in
the neighborhood.

Beside the fact that she ran a pawnshop, which was reputed to be also
a fence, there were only two or three other facts that were known to
her neighbors. One was that in the far past there had been a daughter,
and that while still a very young girl this daughter had disappeared.
It was rumored that the Duchess had placed the daughter in a convent
and that later tire girl had married; but the daughter had never
appeared again in the quarter. Another fact was that there was a
grandson, a handsome young devil, who had come down occasionally to
visit his grandmother, until he began his involuntary sojourn at Sing
Sing. Another fact--this one the best known of all--was that two or
three years before an impudent, willful young girl named Maggie
Carlisle had come to live with her.

It was rather a meager history. People wondered and talked of mystery.
But perhaps the only mystery arose from the fact that the Duchess was
the kind of woman who never volunteered information about her affairs,
and the kind even the boldly curious hesitate to question...

And down here it was, in this unlovely street, in the Duchess's
unlovely house, that the drama of Maggie Carlisle and Larry Brainard
began its unpromising and stormy career: for, though they had thought
of it little, their forebears had been sowers of the wind, they
themselves had sown some of that careless seed and were to sow yet
more--and there was to be the reaping of that seed's wild crop.