I seemed now to float inside rather than live in. As I loped through the upper stories, and climbed up one set of stairs and down another, it only seemed to confirm this feeling-word of my great-aunt's suit, indeed, left me asking myself, "Where in the land am I?" The house, with all its rambling divisions and subdivisions, with its wide spaces, still seemed to have room for only a few particles of myself.
I do not know why I stopped before one particular framed silhouette. It was one I had rarely noticed before. Even if I were to reproduce it here, it would look unremarkable to my reader's eye: an ordinary man's profile, with an old-fashioned three-point hat. It was my grandfather, who had turned furious upon hearing of my father's intention to marry Elizabeth Edes, a Jewish woman. He threatened and fumed, and stripped my father of family money rightfully owed to him. No matter, my father said, for it put him as a young man in a position not so different from my mother's family, who had built their own foundations. Through his packinghouses-"through my enterprise," he said-Father prospered enough to build one of Baltimore 's unique mansions.
But while my father always spoke of his Industry and Enterprise, the traits he found opposite of Genius, I realized, looking upon this picture, that he was the pioneer he had always claimed not to be. For he and Mother had created this world from nothing for the sake of their happiness-and how much impatience and insistence, how much genius, this entailed it could not be said. My father had the very pains of genius he warned against. This is why he tried so hard to keep me away from any but the ordinary path-not because he had embraced it, but because he had deviated from it and found himself, though victorious, also wounded.
The grand old patriarch in the silhouette even unto death did not retract his objections to my mother's Jewish blood having been interjected into our orderly family line. Yet my parents had hung his silhouette in a central place in Glen Eliza, the place erected for our happiness, rather than hiding it, abandoning it, or destroying it. The meaning of this had never struck me fully until this moment. I felt an instant possession of this place and of my family and returned to my desk and to the work at hand.
I received no visitors until the evening Peter arrived.
"No servant to open the door, I see?" he commented, then frowned at himself, as though confessing he could not regulate his mouth sometimes. "Glen Eliza is still as magnificent as when we were children, playing bandits in the halls. Some of my happiest times."
"Think of it, Peter. You, a bandit!"
"Quentin, I want to help."
"How do you mean, Peter?"
He regained his usual bluster. "You never were meant to be a single attorney; you're too excitable. And perhaps I was not meant to have another partner other than you-I have been through two men in the last six months, by the bye. In all events, you need help."
"You mean with my great-aunt's case against me?"
"Wrong!" he exclaimed. "We will turn it into your case against Great-Auntie Clark, my friend." He smiled broadly, like a child.
I proudly welcomed Peter in that day, and he devoted as many hours as he could each evening after completing his work at the law offices. His help was of tremendous value, and I began to feel more optimistic about my chances. Moreover, it seemed I had never known anybody so intimately as my friend, and we talked as people only can before the flickering light of a fireplace.
Still, we both refrained from mentioning Hattie. Until one night, in our shirtsleeves, while making our strategies. Peter said, "At this point in the defense, we shall call Miss Hattie to testify, to show your honest bearing and-"
I looked at Peter with an alarmed expression, as though he had just screamed loudly.
"Peter, I cannot. What I mean-well, you see how it is."
He sighed anxiously, and looked down at his drink. He was taking a nightcap of warm toddy. "She loves you."
"Yes," I said, "as does my great-aunt. Either those who love me fail me, or I fail them, as with Hattie."
Peter stood up from his chair. "My engagement with Hattie is dead, Quentin."
"What? How?"
"I ended it."
"Peter, how could you?"
"I could see it every time she would look in my direction, as though she wished to be looking past