Letty Fox by Christina Stead Page B

faces for lunch), their favorite records on the Inn phonograph (Geraldine Farrar, Schumann-Heink, Caruso), their card games which started at eleven in the morning, their discussions of George Sand’s love life and of the Bluebeard of the day. All their discussions ended in the condemnation of women. They were steel-ribbed ladies of fifty to eighty; to them my mother, and even their own sons and daughters, seemed inexperienced, sexless. To these avid old people, only themselves were alive and burning with sex; the rest of mankind had all to learn. There were two or three old men at the Inn. The only struggles these old women knew were for the attentions of the men, or to be invited to bedroom parties where palms were read and fortunes told. Of course, this was in the days of prohibition when every man was devoted to breaking the law.
    The house belonging to the Morgans in northern Jersey, was on a hillside steep, facing the setting sun and the blue ridges of Pennsylvania. Uncle Percival Hogg called it the old name of the hill, Lydnam Hill, and then changed the name to Lydnam Lodge, to the great annoyance of Aunt Angela who thought a poor man was putting on frills. It was really half a house, built by Grandfather Morgan in a moment of romance, and it looked like a grand-ducal hunting-lodge. Aunt Angela had been a Morgan girl.
    Grandfather Morgan had a motto for his family: “First have a roof over your heads, the rest will follow.” He bought property and houses and looked for years for a large farm, not costing much, on which he could build roofs for his family. Before his powers failed, his family was large, but by that time also he had made some money.
    At length he pitched on Lydnam Hill, and bought the entire hill, a small stony knoll with steep sides, in area about two hundred acres. On it he found three farms with farmhouses, an old forge from revolutionary times, some stony cornfields, a tall wood, a small wood, some moist bottoms near a river, and The Corners, a T-shaped junction of roads at which stood some ruins covered with poison ivy and an old stone cottage. Below the stone cottage was an orchard dipping north.
    Two of the farms were in good repair. On a southeastern slope he built Morgan’s Folly, now called Lydnam Lodge. He poured a fortune into it. It was a museum of modern house designing. He could not get anyone to live in it. It was too far from town and it was really only one room, though that room was the size of the Metropolitan Opera House stage, so that it required a servant.
    The house stood in a wood of elms, beeches, and tulip trees. A place had been cleared under them for a further extension of the Lodge, and the cleared ground was now cluttered up with vines and shrubs, a haunting and hunting place of birds, insects, snakes, and frogs. A little fountain stood beside the flight of steps down to the winding approach. By this approach were stumps of trees intended as bird roosts and bird baths, but which had become ant-skyscrapers and which contained galleries, shoots, liftwells, staircases and apartments under the bark. At the door was a slab of granite with a knocker, on which could be imitated the woodpecker or sapsucker. Down the drive had been planted about one hundred conifers, Douglas fir, white fir, and blue spruce, eastern red cedar, most of which had increased and were now about eight feet high. A runnel about three feet wide ran down the sharp hillside; there many frogs were found and there the chickens came to roost. The undergrowth was full of stumps, fungi, and small and soft plants, many of them medicinal. The farmer’s hens had laid eggs all over the wood. It was not safe to venture there without tall boots and gloves, on account of the copperheads, poison ivy, and other probable dangers; but it was a lovely wood, with mushrooms, mandrakes, lilies, and full of birds.
    The Lodge was a splendid building. The original house had been built on a basement and surrounded by