Read Online The Lost Prince by Selden Edwards - Free Book Online Page B

headline read, a shame, the article concluded, because Workman’s Soap was a “superior product,” one any company, large or small, would be happy to call its own, and CS & C was a proud old family company being run to the ground by a stubborn grandson of the founder.
    “It is good that you have left the interpretation of the investment world to those with heads for it,” Frank said.
    Eleanor managed to maintain a poised façade. “And what if someone had in fact made such an investment?” she asked with outer calm.
    “Well, he would have lost practically everything,” Frank said coldly.“Bankrupt stock has no value.” Then after further thought he added, “Or some opportunist sweeps in and buys at a ridiculously low price.” Frank Burden always took on a paternal air when explaining any of the rudiments of high-level finance or the stock market or any areas of business to his, he assumed, naïve and inexperienced fiancée. “Again, you see,” he added patiently, “it is best to leave the serious decisions to the men of finance. That is what we are for.”
    And that night Eleanor, feeling cold and alone, was confronted by the reality of ruination, a despondency that stayed with her for days. She sat in her living room on Acorn Street, uncertain of the timing but fully aware that disaster loomed ahead, wondering how she should have played out her assigned hand differently.
What have I done?
she thought as she itemized the details of the decision.
What other choice was there?
There were no easy answers, no easy peace, and no one with whom to share her dejection.
    She had lived her entire life in the Acorn Street house, as had her mother before her, and now that her mother and father were both gone, sole ownership had fallen to her and she was supposed to live out her whole life there. She was shocked now to think how easy it had been to sign the deed over to Mr. Lowenstein’s bank and to put the fate of the family house into the hands of an impersonal third party. That was what risk was all about, she was now learning painfully as she reviewed her decisions.
    And one more troubling thought visited her on that night of despair, an old thought, one she had confronted before. Her father had been a weak man and had never gotten over the death of her mother in Eleanor’s eighth year. Because he had been a man of the cloth and a member of one of Boston’s oldest families, no one had realized just how much his life and his promise had collapsed when he lost that great strength that marriage and his wife had provided him. At one point, when Eleanor’s mother was alive and entertaining so beautifully in this very living room, her father had been considered one of the shining lights of the New England clergy, perhaps a future bishop of Massachusetts, a future Phillips Brooks, some said. But then the bottom had dropped out of his life and the decline began, and people wondered if he could keep his position as rector, let alone ascend to a bishopric. But he had taken to drink and not to financial profligacy. He had ruined family life, but not family finances. Her fatherhad been weak, but he had never compromised that family legacy, his own or her mother’s, and when he died, during Eleanor’s junior year at Smith College, the title to the property and the other family holdings remained free and clear, as they had since her mother’s great-grandparents’ day.
    As a compensation perhaps, without a strong father model inside her, she had developed a steely determination of her own, one that served her well in moments of crisis, but one that also stepped in when caution would have been a better course, and pushed her resolutely into action. How much better it would have been in this case to use that cautious part of herself in this moment of decision, to have thought things through the way her mother might have. Now, as many times before, too late, she asked herself, what would Mother have done? She had seen what needed