So far as human knowledge goes, Ross Carr’s wife took no shrewish revenge, though a woman of her nature must have suffered from the blot. She always spoke of his son as “our eldest boy,” and he grew up among brothers and sisters without noting that he was part alien, until some neighbor dropped the fact in his ear. Personally he was much like his father, whose sin matured its bitterest fruit when that child threw himself on the ground to sob in secret agony because the beautiful and tender woman he loved with such devotion was really not his mother. INDIANA THE FAIRFIELD POET TIME, 1881 Tragedy, which is never far from the most prosperous lives, continually trod upon the tenderest-hearted woman in Fairfield. She hated Fairfield as a background to her existence, but there had fate nailed her for life. It was the forlornest of Indiana railroad stations, looking like a scar on the face of a beautifully wooded country, peopled by the descendants of poor white Carolinians and Tennesseeans. The male portion of the community sat on the railroad platform in yellow jeans, sprawling their naked toes to the sun, whittling, and jetting with the regularity of fountains upon the meerschaum-colored boards. The women might have lived lives of primitive simplicity, dignified by child-bearing and neighborly sympathy with one another; but they stained their human kindness with trivial disagreements. This one among them all felt the progress of the age tearing her heartstrings out while her circumstances kept her at a standstill. I do not say her life would have been more symmetrical or her experience richer if she had lived in the whirl. She was a plain, ground-loving woman who enjoyed the companionship of her fruit-trees and flowers, and worked with her hands. Indeed, crowds annoyed her, and she was undecided what toilets ought to be made for a large public. The striped silk dresses of her prosperous days, the fringed crape shawls and gimp-edged mantillas, agreed ill with bonnets of the passing season, and she had more respect for what was rich and old than for new inventions. But she was fiercely ambitious for her children, especially her eldest son, and for him in spite of his misfortune. The younger boy and girl were still leaping like colts upon their few remaining acres, sound in limb and wind, with the hopes of a future sheathed in their healthy present, when Willie was tall as a man, and far up in his teens. His mother had a picture of him taken when he was going to school in Cincinnati, under his uncle’s care. At that time his auburn curls were unshorn, and he was beautiful.