Philip Curtiss, Mummers in Mufti — Chapter 4 (1922)
“ For years Arnold Bellsmith had been the sole possessor of one of those quiet but ponderous fortunes which are found in every New England city, fortunes which have been massed up by nothing more than the simple accumulation of three or four generations and which, in their silent, impregnable bulk, form the despair of eager young business men who are tempted to be exultant in the pride of their first hard-earned and precarious thousands. ”
Philip Curtiss, Mummers in Mufti — Chapter 4 (1922)
“ Like Bellsmith himself, Keefe had a sense of fitness which understood plainly enough that certain occasions, such as a trip to the station or a trip to a doctor's office, no matter how short, called inevitably for the etiquette of a car. Besides, it always amused Keefe to work his way through the traffic at this crowded hour between five and six on a winter evening. The old Bellsmith mansion, behind its tall iron fence, lay in the very heart of the business district of Leicester, the only private residence within a mile of the spot. On one side an office building rose sheer above it. ”
Philip Curtiss, Mummers in Mufti — Chapter 4 (1922)
“ In the days when, paradoxically, new wealth seemed older than old wealth does now, wealth of any kind held itself and was held by others in no small degree of sacredness. At a time when, for all we know, such an inference might well have been justified, the succeeding members of the Bellsmith race were carefully schooled, either actually or by implication, in the obsessing idea that any stranger was a potential adventurer with possible designs less, perhaps, on the Bellsmith money than on the august Bellsmith name. ”
