She had a swift illumination how it would have rejoiced the Ducies to have set up here their staff of rest in the home hallowed as the harbor of their ancestors. They were receptive to all the finer illusions of life. They cherished their personal pride; they revered their ancient name; they honored this spot as the cradle of their forefathers, and although they were poor in the world’s opinion, they held in their own consciousness that treasure of a love of lineage, that obligation to conform to a high standard which imposed a rule of conduct and elevated them in their own esteem. Their standpoint was all drearily out of fashion, funny and forlorn, but she could have wept for them. And why, since the place had no prosaic value, had not Fate left it to those whom it would have so subtly enriched. Here in seemly guise, in well-ordered decorum, in seclusion from the sordid world, the brothers who so dearly loved each other would have dwelt in peace together, would have taken unto themselves wives; children of the name and blood of the old heritage would have been reared here as in an eagle’s nest, with all the high traditions that have been long disregarded and forgotten. It seemed so ignoble, so painful, so unjust, that the place should be thus neglected, despised, cast aside, and yet withheld from its rightful owners. She caught herself suddenly at the word. Her husband, her son, were the rightful owners now, and it was their predecessor who did not care.
As she stood gazing blankly forward the three windows of the upper hall suddenly flamed with a saffron glow, for they faced a great expanse of the southwestern sky, which, for one brief moment, was full of glory. The waters of the Mississippi were a rippling flood of molten gold; the dun-tinted, leafless forests on either bank accentuated in somber contrast this splendid apotheosis of the waning day. The magnolia trees about the house shone with every glossy leaf, an emerald for richness of hue, and all at once, far beyond, Paula beheld the solution of the mystery that had baffled her, the answer to her question, the Duciehurst cotton fields, as white as snow, as level as a floor, as visibly wealth-laden as if the rich yield of the soil were already coined into gold. Here was the interest of the sordid proprietors; the home was no home of theirs; they had been absentees from the first of their tenure. The glimmering marble cross, the lofty granite shaft that showed when the wind shifted among the gloomy boughs of the weeping willows in the family graveyard, marked the resting place of none of their kindred. Their bones were none of these bones, their flesh sprung from none of these dead ashes. The Duciehurst lands made cotton, and cotton made money, and the old house, built under other conditions, was suited to no needs that they could create in the exigencies of a new day. Therefore, it was left to shelter the owl, the gopher, the river-pirate, the shanty-boater, the moon in its revolutions, and when the nights were wild the wind seemed to issue thence as from a lair of mysteries.