Cousin James is a healthy reversion to the primitive type of Father
Abraham, and he has so much aristocratic moss on him that he reminds me
of that old gray crag that hangs over Silver Creek out on Providence
Road. Artistically he is perfectly beautiful in an Old-Testament
fashion. He lives in an ancient, rambling house across the road from my
home, and he is making a souvenir collection of derelict women.
Everybody that dies in Glendale leaves him a relict, and including his
mother, Cousin Martha, he now has either seven or nine female charges,
depending on the sex of Sallie Carruthers's twin babies, which I can't
exactly remember, but will wager is feminine.
My being left to him was an insult to me, though of course Father did
not see it that way. He adored the Crag, as everybody else in Glendale
does, and wouldn't have considered not leaving him precious me. Wanting
to ignore Cousin James, because I was bound out to him until my
twenty-fifth year or marriage, which is worse, has kept me from Glendale
all these four years since father died suddenly while I was away at
college, laid up with the ankle which I broke in the gymnasium. Still,
as much as I resent him, I keep the letter the Crag wrote me the night
after Father died, right where I can put my hand on it if life suddenly
panics me for any reason. It covers all the circumstances I have yet
met. I wonder if I ought to burn it now!
But, to be honest with myself, I will have to confess that the
explosively sentimental scene on the front porch, the night I left for
college, with Polk Hayes has had something to do with my cowardice in
lingering in foreign climes.
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