Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/45

 dying had invested money in certain tracts of waste land in Oklahoma which now poured forth gold in the form of oil. He had been, one gathered from her accounts, a shrewd but ineffectual little man whom she had browbeaten into the status of a consort. Winnery saw him perfectly—the husband of Mrs. Weatherby, Mr. Henrietta Weatherby. He had observed a great many Mr. and Mrs. Weatherbys among the American tourists who visited Brinoë. She spoke of him with condescension and even with a little contempt, as vaguely useless and perfectly insignificant.

"I think I can say honestly," she added, "that he was always spiritually my inferior."

The town of Winnebago Falls, which she also described with a great amount of detail, rose up in a kind of crude reality as a town old as towns went in Iowa, of big houses built in the florid style of the eighties and set back from streets lined with rows of cottonwoods and elms—a town which was the center of an agricultural community and so rather sleepy and quiet and the last place in which to expect such stories as she had to tell of Miss Annie Spragg.

"Winnebago Falls," she said proudly, "was not one of those German settlements in Iowa. It was founded by New Englanders. One of them was my grandfather."

She made it clear that she was important, not alone by wealth, but also by blood, and even more than that by the faith into which she had been born. "Miss Fosdick and myself were both Congregationalists, and in such a place the best people were