Elizabeth, distracted for only a little while from her own thoughts, went back to the sad employment of casting up her sorrows and disappointments. She remembered her childhood on the old Virginia plantation with her father’s mother. The war was not many years past then, and over all her life hung that great black shadow of chaos following defeat, the wreck of fortune, the upheaval of society, the helplessness, the despair of millions of people, with their whole social fabric a wreck, all values destroyed, everything disrupted and out of joint. She had realized later on how General Brandon had stinted himself for the little dark–eyed daughter on the Virginia plantation, and his magnanimous investment of his savings in Egyptian bonds, which made Elizabeth smile faintly in the midst of her wretchedness. In those years of separation and of learning from the great, wide–open book of life, Elizabeth had come to understand her father better than during that part of her life passed with him.
The General was a West Point graduate, and had been the best–loved man in his class, in spite of having been also the handsomest and one of the dullest. So when his old classmates in the army had heard of his straits, they all agreed that “something must be done for Dick Brandon.” Although a West Point man, he was not a scientific man; he was too handsome to know much. His old friends did the best they could for him by getting him a clerkship in Washington; and General Brandon, who had commanded a brigade of three thousand fighting men, during four years of unremitting warfare, found himself subject to a chief of division young enough to be his son and as ignorant as men are made.
The old soldier had borne his lot with a fine patience and a sweet calmness that placed him well up in the ranks of unrecorded heroes. He had a superb courage, a charming temper; he remained incurably handsome, and likewise he was and always remained incurably simple in every way. Anybody could hoodwink him, and most people did. When he had come to Washington, bringing with him his daughter Elizabeth, then eighteen, and some remnant of property coming to him, he bought the shabby house. Or, rather, he thought he bought it, for it had a heavy mortgage on it, which General Brandon never had the least expectation of lifting—mortgages being as natural to Virginians as sparks flying upward.