Page:The Fruit of the Tree (Wharton 1907).djvu/35

Rh banishment from beauty and variety and surprise, seemed to Amherst the very negation of hope and life.

“She’s right,” he mused—“it’s dead—stone. dead: there isn’t a drop of wholesome blood left in it.”

The Moosuc River valley, in the hollow of which, for that river’s sake, the Westmore mills had been planted, lingered in the memory of pre—industrial Hanaford as the pleasantest suburb of the town. Here, beyond a region of orchards and farm-houses, several “leading citizens” had placed, above the river-bank, their prim wood-cut “residences,” with porticoes and terraced lawns; and from the chief of these, Hopewood, brought into the Westmore family by the Miss Hope who had married an earlier Westmore, the grim mill-village had been carved. The pillared “residences” had, after this, inevitably fallen to base uses; but the old house at Hopewood, in its wooded grounds, remained, neglected but intact, beyond the ﬁrst bend of the river, deserted as a dwelling but “held” in anticipation of rising values, when the inevitable growth of Westmore should increase the demand for small building lots. Whenever Amherst’s eyes were refreshed by the hanging foliage above the roofs of Westmore, he longed to convert the abandoned country-seat into a park and playground for the mill-hands; but he knew that the company counted on the gradual sale of Hopewood as a source of proﬁt. No—the mill-town would [ 23 ]