"Of course you don't know!" Utterly leaned back in his chair, his voice sharp with sarcasm. "It is apparently the deliberate intention of this community not only to quench all sparks of divine fire, but to hide their ashes. Basil Everman was the brother of the wife of your college president; he grew up in this town, a person of extraordinary mind; he died. But nobody remembers him or seems to want to remember him. It is an attitude not peculiar to Waltonville; it is characteristic of Keokuk, Ishpeming, and many other communities, bourgeois, intolerable, insane." When Utterly went at eleven o'clock, Eleanor flew to her mother. She was excited and elated, her wonderful day had sloped to no anticlimax. "They have taken my story, mother, and I am to have seventy-five dollars!" "Seventy-five dollars! Land of love!" repeated Mrs. Bent. "Why, Eleanor!" Mrs. Bent's cheeks grew red, then pale. "Mr. Utterly thinks that I really can amount to something. He thinks we should go to New York, mother, and sometime to Europe. He says one must have many different things to write about, and of course that is true. Are you pleased, mother?" "Oh, yes!" Mrs. Bent gasped, as though events were happening too fast for her to follow. "And, mother, did you ever know any one by the name of Basil Everman when you lived here long ago?" Mrs. Bent rose and gathered her work together. Her face reddened again with the flush which came and went so easily. She looked not only startled, but frightened. For some reason Eleanor remembered the long-past encounter with drunken Bates on the shady street. As Mrs. Bent answered, she walked out into the darkened kitchen, her voice coming back with a muffled sound. "He didn't talk about Basil Everman!" "Yes, he did. He said that Basil Everman wrote wonderfully, and that nobody in Waltonville appreciated him or was willing to tell anything about him. Did you know him, mother?" "Yes," answered Mrs. Bent. "I knew him." She came back into the lamplight. "Ain't you sleepy, Eleanor?" But Eleanor was not to be thus easily turned away. Basil Everman was Richard Lister's uncle and that was enough to make him interesting. "Did you know him well, mother?" Mrs. Bent put out her hand toward the lamp. "Start upstairs, then I'll outen the light." "Did you say you knew him well, mother?" "Not so very well." "Did you know about his writing?" "No." "Is Richard anything like him?" "No." "Was he anything like Mrs. Lister?" "No." Mrs. Bent turned out the lamp and followed Eleanor up the stairs. At the head she bade her good-night. At the window of her room, which looked toward the garden and the houses of the town, she sat a long time. There was on her face the same expression of alarm that had rested there when she sat in the parlor listening to Richard and Eleanor play. It was the expression of one who felt herself to be entangled in a net from which there was no escape.