I don't know what they
thought I was there to do--perhaps to buy out the city's debt or get
a controlling hold of some railway interest. Or, perhaps, they
imagined that I wanted to buy a newspaper, for they were either
politicians or reporters, which, of course, comes to the same thing.
As a matter of fact, my property in Philadelphia was mostly real
estate in the old-fashioned part of the city and all I wanted to do
there was just to satisfy myself that the houses were in good repair
and the doors kept properly painted. I wanted also to see my
relations, of whom I had a few. These were mostly professional
people and they were mostly rather hard up because of the big
bank failure in 1907 or thereabouts. Still, they were very nice.
They would have been nicer still if they hadn't, all of them, had
what appeared to me to be the mania that what they called
influences were working against them. At any rate, the impression
of that city was one of old-fashioned rooms, rather English than
American in type, in which handsome but careworn ladies,
cousins of my own, talked principally about mysterious
movements that were going on against them. I never got to know
what it was all about; perhaps they thought I knew or perhaps
there weren't any movements at all.
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