Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad
He had made his vast fortune on the Pacific Coast and during his
years of busy activity had been practically forgotten by the Eastern
members of his family, who never had credited him with sufficient
ability to earn more than a precarious livelihood. But the man was
shrewd enough in a business way, although simple almost to childishness
in many other matters. When he returned, quite unheralded, to end his
days "at home" and employ his ample wealth to the best advantage, he for
a time kept his success a secret, and so learned much of the
dispositions and personal characteristics of his three nieces.
They were at that time visiting his unmarried sister, Jane, at her
estate at Elmhurst, whither they had been invited for the first time;
and in the race for Aunt Jane's fortune he watched the three girls
carefully and found much to admire in each one of them. Patsy Doyle,
however, proved exceptionally frank and genuine, and when Aunt Jane at
last died and it was found she had no estate to bequeath, Patsy proved
the one bright star in the firmament of disappointment. Supposing Uncle
John to be poor, she insisted upon carrying him to New York with her and
sharing with him the humble tenement room in which she lived with her
father--a retired veteran who helped pay the family expenses by keeping
books for a mercantile firm, while Patsy worked in a hair-dresser's
shop.
It was now that Uncle John proved a modern fairy godfather to Aunt
Jane's nieces--who were likewise his own nieces. The three girls had
little in common except their poverty, Elizabeth De Graf being the
daughter of a music teacher, in Cloverton, Ohio, while Louise Merrick
lived with her widowed mother in a social atmosphere of the second class
in New York, where the two women frankly intrigued to ensnare for Louise
a husband who had sufficient means to ensure both mother and daughter a
comfortable home. In spite of this worldly and unlovely ambition, which
their circumstances might partially excuse, Louise, who was but
seventeen, had many good and womanly qualities, could they have been
developed in an atmosphere uninfluenced by the schemes of her vain and
selfish mother.
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