It was one of this same new and “fittest” species who had already relieved poor Mr. McAlery Willett of his fortune.  Mr. Willett was a trusting soul who had never known how to take care of himself or his money, people said, and now that he had lost it they blamed him.  Some had been saved enough for him and Nancy to live on in the old house, with careful economy.  It was Nancy who managed the economy, who accomplished remarkable things with a sum they would have deemed poverty in former days.  Her mother had died while I was at Cambridge.  Reverses did not subdue Mr. Willett’s spirits, and the fascination modern “business” had for him seemed to grow in proportion to the misfortunes it had caused him.  He moved into a tiny office in the Durrett Building, where he appeared every morning about half-past ten to occupy himself with heaven knows what short cuts to wealth, with prospectuses of companies in Mexico or Central America or some other distant place:  once, I remember, it was a tea, company in which he tried to interest his friends, to raise in the South a product he maintained would surpass Orange Pekoe.  In the afternoon between three and four he would turn up at the Boyne Club, as well groomed, as spruce as ever, generally with a flower in his buttonhole.  He never forgot that he was a gentleman, and he had a gentleman’s notions of the fitness of things, and it was against his principles to use, a gentleman’s club for the furtherance of his various enterprises.

“Drop into my office some day, Dickinson,” he would say.  “I think I’ve got something there that might interest you!”

He reminded me, when I met him, that he had always predicted I would get along in life....

The portrait of Nancy at this period is not so easily drawn.  The decline of the family fortunes seemed to have had as little effect upon her as upon her father, although their characters differed sharply.  Something of that spontaneity, of that love of life and joy in it she had possessed in youth she must have inherited from McAlery Willett, but these qualities had disappeared in her long before the coming of financial reverses.  She was nearing thirty, and in spite of her beauty and the rarer distinction that can best be described as breeding, she had never married.  Men admired her, but from a distance; she kept them at arm’s length, they said:  strangers who visited the city invariably picked her out of an assembly and asked who she was; one man from New York who came to visit Ralph and who had been madly in love with her, she had amazed many people by refusing, spurning all he might have given her.  This incident seemed a refutation of the charge that she was calculating.  As might have been foretold, she had the social gift in a remarkable degree, and in spite of the limitations of her purse the knack of dressing better than other women, though at that time the organization of our social life still remained comparatively simple, the custom of luxurious and expensive entertainment not having yet set in.