“That’s just it!” she wailed, hooding her blue gaze under grieving white lids. “Halfway--always halfway....” He stared for an instant and then cleared his throat. “Now, look here, Effie, you want to get this front family bee out of your bonnet,” he said gruffly. “I’ll never get a sniff of the top-layer practice! Why, there’s doctors doddering around this berg that tapped a drum in the Lost Cause, and their sons are carrying on their practice, and grandsons on the mark, ready to go! It’s a close corporation; no outsider’d ever get a smell! And that suits me,” he finished robustly. “Plain man myself, likes to deal with plain people. I’ll get all I need with the tradespeople and the mill workers and the mountaineers. That’s our kind, Effie! Let small boats keep near the shore!” The fine old residence section was on softly rolling ridges back of the city and above it: the cotton mills were down on the level. One spoke of The Hill, and the mills, and between the two, inevitably, was a great gulf fixed. Dwellers on The Hill looked down on the rest of the community, literally and figuratively, which was their quite natural and pleasant prerogative, and had never annoyed anybody except the Darrows, while mill hands and villagers looked up to The Hill, again in the double sense and without rancor. The Darrows’ characterless house was on a dull street which ran from the business section to the heights: beneath the one in birth and breeding and background (Effie was keen enough to know that money mattered little) and above the other.... Often, during the first weeks, she took her child by the hand and walked up to the seats of the mighty at her frail and hesitating gait. The heat was modified by a piney and pungent breeze; they did not even seek the shady side of the street. Fine old houses sat well back from their gracious gateways; vague white and faintly tinted figures moved among the trees and shrubbery; soft voices, light laughter, drifted out to her. Sometimes a gorgeous cardinal would sit on a blossoming bough and make joyous, liquid inquiry: “_What cheer? What cheer? What cheer?_” The woman was almost overborne by her yearning to go up the shaded walks, to cross the ancient lawns, to mount the shallow steps, to enter into and become a component part of the story-book life, but for all their gates swung wide and vines wrapped confidently about rusted hinges she could sense the barriers.