He had broken
the succession in a line of priests; but it seemed to him that he had
simply told what he wanted to do for a living. So he went away to the
city, and news came flying back of his wonderful fitness for the trade.
He understood colors, fabrics, design; he had been sent abroad for
ideas, and finally he was dispatched to the Chicago house, to oversee
the business there. Thus it was many years before Dilly met him again;
but they remained honestly faithful, each from a lovely simplicity of
nature, but a simplicity quite different in kind. Jethro did not grow
rich very fast (uncle Silas saw to that), but he did prosper; and he
was ready to marry his girl long before she owned herself ready to
marry him. She took care of a succession of aged relatives, all
afflicted by a strange and interesting diversity of trying diseases;
and then, after the last death, she settled down, quite poor, in a
little house on the Tiverton Road, and "went out nussin'," the
profession for which her previous life had fitted her. With a careless
generosity, she made over to her brother the old farmhouse where they
were born, because he had a family and needed it. But he died, and was
soon followed by his wife and child; and now Dilly was quite alone with
the house and the family debts.
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