and
Mrs. Vertrees sometimes mentioned to each other, after thirty years
of possession, as "very fine things." They had been the first people
in town to possess Landseer engravings, and there, in art, they had
rested, but they still had a feeling that in all such matters they
were in the van; and when Mr. Vertrees discovered Landseers upon the
walls of other people's houses he thawed, as a chieftain to a trusted
follower; and if he found an edition of Bulwer Lytton accompanying
the Landseers as a final corroboration of culture, he would say,
inevitably, "Those people know good pictures and they know good
books."
The growth of the city, which might easily have made him a
millionaire, had ruined him because he had failed to understand it.
When towns begin to grow they have whims, and the whims of a town
always ruin somebody. Mr. Vertrees had been most strikingly the
somebody in this case. At about the time he bought the Landseers,
he owned, through inheritance, an office-building and a large house
not far from it, where he spent the winter; and he had a country
place--a farm of four hundred acres--where he went for the summers
to the comfortable, ugly old house that was his home now, perforce,
all the year round.
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