Page:Possession (1926).pdf/43

 in. In the big house, beneath the unceasing fall of soot from the furnaces, Julia Shane with her spinster daughter, Irene, lived in three rooms. It was this state of affairs which led people in the Town to believe that her fortune had decreased in some mysterious way. The old woman alone knew that she could have bought up Harvey Seton, tossed his corset factory into the midst of the Atlantic Ocean and never missed the money. She lived upon the income of her income. The Town, so far as she was concerned, no longer existed.

These things played an important part in the life of the Town. No one ever tired of discussing them. It was by these standards that citizens were judged; and there were no better standards in a town which had emerged less than a century before from a complete wilderness. There was nothing unusual in them, for it is the man of property after all whom most people, in their heart of hearts, honor most profoundly.

The success of Harvey Seton was, in itself, not especially interesting. It paralleled very closely the tale of any successful middle-western manufacturer. The interest lay in what he manufactured and in his character. He was born and brought up in what people call straitened circumstances. At twenty-one he entered a pharmaceutical school and upon being graduated, started life as a clerk in a pharmacy of the Town. For eight years he lived rigorously and saved his money. He was a Methodist and attended church regularly, despising card-playing and the theater as implements of the devil. In this there is nothing unusual. It is here that the bizarre makes its appearance.

There came a day when he learned that Samuel Barr, a brother of Julia Shane and of Mrs. Tolliver's father, had invented a combination of gutta percha and steel which served as an admirable substitute for whalebone. Now Samuel Barr was always inventing something. He invented a cash-carrier, a patent rocker, and had even meddled with the idea of perpetual motion. He had invented a machine which he set up in a field on the farm of his brother-in-law, because he said the contrivance, once it was started, would