II
We decided that we wanted to get away from ocean winds; and I had met a tennis professional who lived in Pasadena and who assured me I would find plenty of tennis there. So we made the move and found ourselves a brown-painted, two-story house on Sunset Avenue, a remote part of the town. It was covered with a huge vine of red roses, and roses were as important to Craig as tennis was to me.
The house stood on the edge of a slope, with the valley of the Arroyo Seco to the west. It was unfurnished, so Craig would walk several blocks to the streetcar, ride a couple of miles downtown, and then wander about looking for secondhand furniture shops. That way she got three chairs with ragged upholstery for our living room, two beds for upstairs, and packing boxes for tables and bureaus. We were able to do all those things because Brett had accepted King Coal and paid a five-hundred-dollar advance. After that magical achievement, Craig was boss of the family.
Pasadena in the year 1916 was a small town that called itself “City of Roses” and was called by others “City of Millionaires.” These last occupied the wide, elegant Orange Grove Avenue, with palaces on both sides and two very elegant hotels for the winter visitors. We had no thought of the rich, and never expected them to have any thought of us in our humble brown cottage overlooking the sunset. The beautiful roses and the sunsets were enough for Craig, and as for me, I had started The Coal War, a sequel to King Coal, with more about Mary Burke and her clothes. I had learned now!
But wherever there are millionaires there are also socialists—they are cause and effect. The socialists came to see me and invited me to speak at a meeting in support of a proposed co-operative; of course I went. I had found a woman secretary to type my manuscripts—another necessity of my life—and in the course of the evening this lady came to my wife and whispered a portentous sentence: “Mrs. Gartz wants to meet you.”
“Who is Mrs. Gartz?” asked Craig; and the awe-stricken secretary replied, “Oh, my dear, she is the richest woman in Pasadena.”
Craig said, “Well, bring her here.”
The secretary, dismayed, responded, “She said for you to come to her.”
The secretary didn’t know Craig very well, but she learned about her right there. “If she wants to meet me,” said Craig, “she will come to me.” And that was that.
When the meeting was over, the secretary came back, and with her was a large, magnificent lady of the kind that Craig had known all through her girlhood. The lady was introduced; and, of course, she knew another lady when she met one. More especially, she knew a lovely Southern voice and manner; so she asked if she might come to see us, and Craig said that she might. Craig made no apology for her living room that had only three ragged chairs in it—the biggest one for the large rich lady and the other two for Craig and myself.
Mrs. Kate Crane-Gartz was the elder daughter of Charles R. Crane, plumbing magnate of Chicago, dead then for several years. He had been a newspaper celebrity, not only because he was one of the richest men in America but because he differed from most rich men in being talkative and in voicing original opinions. He was particularly down on college education, insisting that it was all wasteful nonsense. He hadn’t had one himself, and look where he had got!
Mrs. Gartz was an elegant lady with a haughty manner and a tender heart. She had had many sorrows, which we learned about in the course of time. She had lost two of her children in a theater fire in Chicago. She still had a son and a daughter, both of whom she adored, but they gave her little happiness. She had a soft heart and an overfull purse, and she was preyed upon freely—all that we learned soon. But there was one person who would never prey upon her, and that was Mary Craig Sinclair.