The young man reseated himself and looked about idly at the rich ornamentation of the hotel room.
"Some class this," he observed, concerning the Eclair Hotel, which was precisely what the hotel management wanted its patrons to feel.
"Did you see your sister in Philadelphia?" Adelle asked.
"Yep," he replied non-committally. Evidently his tour of the family had not begun favorably, and Adelle refrained from pressing the questions she had in mind.
"You have some first cousins, too, haven't you?" Adelle asked, remembering the judge's inquiry.
"A whole bunch of 'em!" the mason laughed. "Father had two brothers and one sister, and all of 'em had big families, and my mother had a lot of nephews and nieces, but they don't count for the inheritance."
In contrast with the Alton Clarks, of whom Adelle was the sole survivor, the California branch of the family had been prolific. Adelle realized that as the judge had pointed out to her, it was not simply a question of endowing one intelligent, interesting young man with a half of Clark's Field, but of parceling it out in small lots to a numerous family connection—a much less pleasant deed.
"Do you know these Clark cousins?" she asked.
"Some of 'em," the mason said. "They don't amount to much, the lot of 'em. There's only one made any stir in the world, that's Stan Clark, my uncle Samuel's son. He's in the California Legislature," he said with a certain pride. "And they tell me he's as much of a crook as they make 'em! Then there's a brother of Stan—Sol Clark. He runs a newspaper up in Fresno County, and I guess he's another little crook. There's a bunch of Clarks down in Los Angeles, in the fruit commission business—I don't know nothing about them. Oh, there's Clarks enough of our sort!" he concluded grimly.
Adelle could see that the stone mason had very slight intercourse with any of his cousins. Like most working-people he was necessarily limited in his social relations to his immediate neighbors, the relatives he could get at easily in his free hours—holidays and Sundays and after his eight hours of work was done. The mason's hands were not formed for much penmanship! Adelle also realized that the stone mason, like more prosperous people, did not love the members of his family just because they were Clarks. There was no close family bond of any sort. The mason knew less about his immediate relatives than he did about many other people in the world, and felt less close to them; and of course she knew them not even by name. She felt no great incentive to bequeath small portions of Clark's Field to these unknown little people who happened to bear the name of Clark—now that the law no longer demanded a distribution of the estate, in fact prohibited it!