She paused for a moment, and eyed them calculatingly.  It occurred to her that she had been talking about music and herself quite enough.  She would change the subject to something matter-of-fact.  “See here, you’ll be sure to have to hear all that story from Mr. Bayweather in relentless detail.  It might be your salvation to be able to say that I had told you, without mentioning that it was in a severely abridged form.  He’d want to start back in the eighteenth century, and tell you all about that discreditable and unreconstructed Tory ancestor of mine who, when he was exiled from Ashley, is said to have carried off part of the town documents with him to Canada.  Whether he did or not (Mr. Bayweather has a theory, I believe, that he buried them in a copper kettle on Peg-Top Hill), the fact remains that an important part of the records of Ashley are missing and that has made a lot of trouble with titles to land around here.  Several times, unscrupulous land-grabbers have taken advantage of the vagueness of the titles to cheat farmers out of their inheritance.  The Powers case is typical.  There always have been Powerses living right there, where they do now; that big pine that towers up so over their house was planted by ’Gene’s great-grandfather.  And they always owned an immense tract of wild mountain land, up beyond the Eagle Rock range, along the side of the Red-Brook marsh.  But after paying taxes on it for generations all during the time when it was too far away to make it profitable to lumber, it was snatched away from them, seven years ago, just as modern methods and higher prices for spruce would have made it very valuable.  A lawyer from New Hampshire named Lowder turned the trick.  I won’t bother you going into the legal details—­a question of a fake warranty deed, against ’Gene’s quit-claim deed, which was all he had in absence of those missing pages from the town records.  As a matter of fact, the lawyer hasn’t dared to cut the lumber off it yet, because his claim is pretty flimsy; but flimsy or not, the law regards it as slightly better than ’Gene’s.  The result is that ’Gene can’t sell it and daren’t cut it for fear of being involved in a law-suit that he couldn’t possibly pay for.  So the Powers are poor farmers, scratching a difficult living out of sterile soil, instead of being well-to-do proprietors of a profitable estate of wood-land.  And when we see how very hard they all have to work, and how soured and gloomy it has made ‘Gene, and how many pleasures the Powers’ children are denied, we all join in when Mrs. Powers delivers herself of her white-hot opinion of New Hampshire lawyers!  I remember perfectly that Mr. Lowder,—­one of the smooth-shaven, thin-lipped, fish-mouthed variety, with a pugnacious jaw and an intimidating habit of talking his New Hampshire dialect out of the corner of his mouth.  The poor Powers were as helpless as rabbits before him.”

It all came up before her as she talked, that horrid encounter with commercial ruthlessness:  she saw again poor ’Gene’s outraged face of helpless anger, felt again the heat of sympathetic indignation she and Neale had felt, recognized again the poison which triumphant unrighteousness leaves behind.  She shook her head impatiently, to shake off the memory, and said aloud, “Oh, it makes me sick to remember it!  We couldn’t believe, any of us, that such bare-faced iniquity could succeed.”