This Side of Glory by Gwen Bristow

Author:Gwen Bristow [Bristow, Gwen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical, Romance, General, Sagas
ISBN: 9781480485174
Google: J5hxAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

1

Eleanor’s opinion of Isabel was scornful and briefly expressed.

“And you asked her to marry you! You’re a very fortunate man, Kester Larne. All right, since you’ve promised to ignore her I’ll do the same.”

“Good,” said Kester. “Then it’s quits all around?”

“Quits,” said Eleanor.

Kester gave her a humorously grateful smile.

Eleanor pushed Isabel into a back pigeonhole of her mind, telling herself that now she could be calm, but she still found no peace. For without the problem of Isabel to occupy them her thoughts leaped back to the torment of cotton. The exchanges reopened on the sixteenth of November, and cotton was salable at five cents a pound.

At such a price Kester and Eleanor could not have repaid what it had cost to grow the cotton, to say nothing of financing the plantation for another crop. They held the cotton desperately. The newspapers were trying to bolster the courage of the planters by reminding them that Europe needed cotton duck for tents and cotton cloth for uniforms, and that the rising cost of living in the United States would force the people to buy more cotton clothes instead of silk and wool, so that the crop would eventually be disposed of at a reasonable price. But they urged that very little cotton be planted in the spring, and the Secretary of Agriculture in Washington publicly demanded that bankers and merchants refuse to extend credit to any planter who did not first promise a sharp reduction in his cotton acreage.

Kester and Eleanor spent the winter studying the possibilities of food crops. Before the Civil War part of Ardeith had been planted in sugarcane, and another part in oranges, but today most cane was grown west of the river and the land nearer the Gulf had been found more suitable for orange trees. “Rice?” Eleanor suggested hopefully. Kester told her they would have to build siphons to bring the water across the levee to flood the fields, and import laborers who knew how to grow rice. “Nobody up here knows rice any more,” he said. “It’s grown in southwest Louisiana. We might try corn, but the country had a bumper corn crop last year and half the cotton planters are already planning to put in corn next spring.”

One day in January Sylvia came in to ask for a subscription to the Belgian Relief Fund. Eleanor told her curtly it was all she could do this winter to feed her own child, let alone feeding the Belgians. If she wouldn’t help the Belgians, Sylvia persisted, would she at least promise that when she served gelatine desserts she would insist on getting Hooper’s gelatine? “You see, dear, they have a yellow label on one side of the box,” she explained, showing a sample package, “and if you cut off the label and send it to the Housewives’ League they’ll send it to the company and the company will redeem the labels for one cent each and give it to the Red Cross—”

“Why don’t they give the Red Cross all the postage that will take?” Eleanor inquired.

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