Cressida Garnet, as all the world knows, was lost on the Titanic.  Poppas and Horace, who had been travelling with her, were sent on a week earlier and came as safely to port as if they had never stepped out of their London hotel.  But Cressida had waited for the first trip of the sea monster—­she still believed that all advertising was good—­and she went down on the road between the old world and the new.  She had been ill, and when the collision occurred she was in her stateroom, a modest one somewhere down in the boat, for she was travelling economically.  Apparently she never left her cabin.  She was not seen on the decks, and none of the survivors brought any word of her.

On Monday, when the wireless messages were coming from the Carpathia with the names of the passengers who had been saved, I went, with so many hundred others, down to the White Star offices.  There I saw Cressida’s motor, her redoubtable initials on the door, with four men sitting in the limousine.  Jerome Brown, stripped of the promoter’s joviality and looking flabby and old, sat behind with Buchanan Garnet, who had come on from Ohio.  I had not seen him for years.  He was now an old man, but he was still conscious of being in the public eye, and sat turning a cigar about in his face with that foolish look of importance which Cressida’s achievement had stamped upon all the Garnets.  Poppas was in front, with Horace.  He was gnawing the finger of his chamois glove as it rested on the top of his cane.  His head was sunk, his shoulders drawn together; he looked as old as Jewry.  I watched them, wondering whether Cressida would come back to them if she could.  After the last names were posted, the four men settled back into the powerful car—­one of the best made—­and the chauffeur backed off.  I saw him dash away the tears from his face with the back of his driving glove.  He was an Irish boy, and had been devoted to Cressida.

When the will was read, Henry Gilbert, the lawyer, an old friend of her early youth, and I, were named executors.  A nice job we had of it.  Most of her large fortune had been converted into stocks that were almost worthless.  The marketable property realized only a hundred and fifty thousand dollars.  To defeat the bequest of fifty thousand dollars to Poppas, Jerome Brown and her family contested the will.  They brought Cressida’s letters into court to prove that the will did not represent her intentions, often expressed in writing through many years, to “provide well” for them.

Such letters they were!  The writing of a tired, overdriven woman; promising money, sending money herewith, asking for an acknowledgment of the draft sent last month, etc.  In the letters to Jerome Brown she begged for information about his affairs and entreated him to go with her to some foreign city where they could live quietly and where she could rest; if they were careful, there would “be enough for all.”  Neither Brown nor her brothers and sisters had any sense of shame about these letters.  It seemed never to occur to them that this golden stream, whether it rushed or whether it trickled, came out of the industry, out of the mortal body of a woman.  They regarded her as a natural source of wealth; a copper vein, a diamond mine.