Best Laid Schemes

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE CAMPBELLS ARE COMING I It is not to be counted against Mrs. Robert Fleming Ward that at forty-five she had begun to look backward a little wistfully and forward a little disconsolately and apprehensively. She was a good woman, indeed one of the best of women, loyal, conscientious and self- sacrificing in the highest degree. But she was poignantly aware that certain ambitions dear to her heart had not been realized. Robert Fleming Ward had not attained that high place at the Sycamore County bar which had been his goal, and he seemed unable to pull himself to the level with Canby Taylor and Addison Swiggart who practiced in federal jurisdictions and were not unknown to the docket of the United States Supreme Court. Even as Mrs. Ward was a good woman, so her husband Robert was a good man and a good lawyer. But just being good wasn't getting the Wards anywhere. At least it wasn't landing them within the golden portals of their early dreams. To find yourself marking time professionally and socially in a town of seventy- five thousand souls, that you've seen grow from twenty- five thousand, is a disagreeable experience if you are a sensitive person. And Mrs. Ward was sensitive. It grieved her to witness the prosperity flaunted by people like the Picketts, the Shepherds, the Kirbys and others comparatively new to the community, whohad impudently availed themselves of Sycamore County's clay to make brick, and of its water power to turn the wheels of industries for which the old time Kernville pioneer stock had gloomily predicted failure. The Picketts, the Shepherds, the Kirbys and the rest of the new element had builded themselves houses that were much more comfortable and pleasing to the eye than the houses of the children and grandchildren of the old families that had foun...