Harrison Phillips had few illusions concerning his sister-in-law, and she knew it. Years before they had reached the point where they dispensed with polite subterfuges and usually confined their social intercourse to the superficial surface of conversation. He had known her ever since she came to Chicago from a little Illinois town to study music. Indeed, he had first introduced his younger brother to her, he remembered unhappily. She was Louise Faunce, then,—a keen, brown-eyed country girl of eighteen. When Will Phillips wanted to marry her, the judge had already felt the pretty girl's little claws, and had been foolish enough to warn his brother of his fate. Will Phillips was a dull young man, and had poor health. The older brother knew that Will was being married for his money,—a considerable fortune for a girl from Ottumwa, Illinois.
And the marriage had not been a happy one. The last years of his life Will Phillips had taken to drinking. The judge felt that the wife had driven his brother to his sodden end, and he hated her for it, with a proper and legal hatred. Six months before his end Will Phillips had come home from Europe, leaving his two children in Paris with his wife, apparently for an indefinite separation. Why the widow had chosen to return to Chicago after her husband's death was a mystery to the judge, who never gave Louise Phillips credit for half her character. For she was shrewd enough to perceive that neither she nor her children could have any permanent position in the world outside of Chicago. And she had no mind to sacrifice the social position that her husband's family and friends had made for her.
She told her brother-in-law on her return that she had found Europe an unsuitable place in which to bring up the children, and proposed before long to build a new house, perhaps in Forest Park,—one of the older and more desirable suburbs to the north of the city.
"I must make a home for my children among their father's friends," she said to the judge with perfect propriety. "Venetia, especially, should have the right background now that she is becoming a young woman."
Venetia—so named in one of the rare accesses of sentiment which came to Mrs. Phillips, as to all mortals, because it was to Venice that she had first been taken as a young bride—was now sixteen years old. Her brother Stanwood, a year younger, had been placed in a fashionable Eastern school, where he was preparing for Yale, and ultimately for the "career of diplomacy," as his mother called it.
The judge, who was trustee for his brother's children, had called this Sunday afternoon to discuss the project of the new house with his sister-in-law. She had notified him that she should need presently a considerable sum of money, and expected to take a part of it, at least, from the children's inheritance. About this money matter they had come to a warm difference of opinion, which Mrs. Phillips had put aside momentarily to discuss the Jackson will.
"If you will wait," she remarked, having exhausted her opinion about philanthropy and Powers Jackson's will, "you might see my architect. I have asked Mr. Hart to call this afternoon."
"I don't pine to see him," the old man retorted testily. "So you have gone that far?"
"Yes! There isn't the slightest use of being disagreeable about it, you see. Nothing that you can say will change my mind. It never has. You would like to keep me from spending the money. But you can't without a row, a scandal. Besides, I know it will be a good investment for both the children."
"You were always pretty keen for a good investment!"