The Ely miner. [volume] (Ely, Minn.) 1895-1986, 1931-05-22
THE
CRANDALLS
AND THE
STENDHALS
%*%***
BY FANNIE HURST
,ZSSZSNTEL[NNl SNzSI7SnIS1SnTSI
Observation-Disclosures
&c by Mcclure Newspaper Syndicate.)
(WNU Service.)

THE house of the Crandalls in
Wittegar street was one of those
massive brick-and-Stone affairs
that looked as If il had been
built and passed on for few gener-
atoms from father to son. And so it
had, except in the case of the Crandall
branch now in occupancy, it had been
case of from father to daughter.
Martha Crandall had married Deep
ing Johnson in her fathers home and
remained there after her marriage,
and after the death of the elder Gran
dali.
Martha Crandall Johnson's daughter
Adeline had been born in that same
house, in the same stodgy. high-ceil-
ing, wainscoated bedroom in which
she herself was born.
You felt about the house of the
Crandalls that the people who inhabit-
ed it had not made their money over
night, so to speak. Crandalls, ever
since Crandalls had lived there, had
been able TO afford the substantial
things of life.
Little Adeline Crandall Johnson
grew up in that environment, as blithe-
ly as if the somber old house had been
a rose garden. She fitted through it's
halls. She danced through its dark
corridors as brilliantly as a butterfly,
caught in some strange netherworld
environment.
She was something quite so alien
to them and yet so intellectually fasci-
mating. She had been born in the chill
autumns of their lives, when Martha
was forty-two and her husband fifty.
Almost any way you looked at her she
was phenomenon, the last creature in
the world you would have expected to
spring from the union of two such an
gular souls at Martha Crandall and
Deeping Johnson.
Unconscious, Of the incongruity OF
her young presence in the deep brown
plush of the Crandall-Johnson environ
ment, Adeline rushed into the flush of
her adolescence.
By this time the Crandall-JOhnsons
tory of all the Crandalls who had oc-
cupied that house on Wittegar street.
Not only had Martha come into
vaster than ever accumulation of
Crandall's monies, but Deeping John
son had practically cornered one Of
the most important cotton markets in
the history Of the industry.
When Adeline Crandall Johnson was
seventeen she was heiress to seven
million dollars. More than that, and
with an obsolete kind of solemnity of
which they were totally unconscious,
the parents of Adeline had picked out
for her in marriage the son of another
local millionaire. 1t was one of those
predetermined affairs about which
there had not been much family dis
cussion. 1t is doubtful if Adeline her.
self, in those years when she and the
fat young boy were so consciously sent
to dancing school together, was even
conscious of the import of what was
happening.
Certainly she never took Donald
Dugan seriously enough to even resent
him. The fact that at seventeen and
eighteen they were unofficially consid-
cred engaged, glanced off her bright
young conscience with scarcely an i'm
pact.
One night, however, in the great
deep brown plush parlor, the young Du-
gan, probably on the crest of his first
fierce wave of Audience, caught her
into his short round arms and kissed
her wetly, patty, roundly, and with pos
SeSSiveneSS on the lips.
Four weeks later Adeline Crandall
Johnson eloped with her music teacher.
For three months the great, solemn,
brown doors were closed to Adeline
ant her slender blond husband. Then
sOlemnly. inevitably and rather terri
bly,, with the news that Adeline was
with child, they swung open, taking
into the silent nav of that house on
Wittegar street, the young figures of
Adeline and Jacques Stendhal.
Promptly it swallowed them.
Promptly it engulfed them. Prompt
ly the solemnity of that environment
flowed around them in rivers brown
as mud. The young Frenchman who
had married Adeline because to him
she was flower almost too sweet to
pluck, pulled in the beginning against
the drag of this environment.
But in the end he, too, began to
succumb.
By the time Adelines baby girl was
born, the young pair were part and
parcel of the house located ON Witte-
gar street.
1t cannot be said for Jacques Stend-
hal that he was of the stuff that par
ents would select as the husband Of a
loved daughter. He was a frail fell