Evening Star Newspaper, June 2, 1929, Page 107

. WASHINGTON, D. C., JUNE 2, 1920—PART 7. Antoinette. NTIL Ella was 14, the loveliest uni- form in all the world was the one worn by her mother. She seldom, if ever, saw her out of it, except on magic Thursday afternoons when they shopped, had their supper in a little self- service restaurant and went to a motion-picture theater together. On these days, Ella’s mother slipped into a plain drab-colored frock and a dark brown coat with a piece of coarse fur around the neck. She lost luster. In the big, beautiful house on the top of the hill where they had lived ever since Ella could remember, her mother had worn the bright gray, highly finished alpaca frock with a sheer patch of organdy apron in front and a crisp organdy cap on the top of her pretty brown hair. To Ella, especially when she saw her mother smartly wielding a pert feather duster in and out of the precious little objects that covered Mrs. Fresco’s dressing table, there was something of a pretty and bright-eyed bird about her mother. Quick, alert, and a little saucy. Mrs. Fresco, a large, florid woman whose hands gleamed with jewels even at breakfast and whose short, asthmatic breathing was one of the dominant noises in the household, came, as the asthmatic affliction increased its hold of her, to depend more and more on the bright person of Ella’s mother. “Annie” was Ella’s mother’s given name. Mrs. Fresco found it too commonplace, so the very first month that Annie, handicapped by her 4-year-old child, had succeeded in gaining employment in the Fresco house, her mistress had refused to call her by any other name than Antoinette, THE room occupied by Antoinette and her ' daughter was a little, slap-sided one up under the eaves of the beautiful old house. It was not an unpleasant room, even though it was furnished with all the cast-off odds-and- ends of the household. Its three Gothic- shaped windows, arched at the top like eye- brows, looked out upon the beautiful orchards of the Fresco estate. And sometimes at eve- ning, before Antoinette tucked her young one into bed, little Ella and her mother could look out from one of these windows upon star shine and moon shine and see it reflected in the swan-dotted natural lake that lay to the left of the house. If Antoinette sometimes found her role in that household almost unbearable, her little girl was the last one to know it. As Mrs. Fresco, her life fraught with the complexities of her role as social dictator, grew heavier and more asthmatic, her demands upon her maid sometimes became intolerable. And yet only too well Antoinette realized, and was made to realize by Mrs. Fresco, her difficult and anomalous situation. Widowed women with children did not find it easy to obtain positions, Antoinette knew that from bitter experience. The thought of placing her little girl in an institution was simply outside her reckoning. And so, throughout the years, Antoinette re- mained on. There were, after all, great advantages in the situation. Mr. Fresco, a great, hearty man ' d Being an Unusual Ending T'o a Usual Complication. of 50, was kindness and consideration itself. With all her heart, Antoinette pitied him the nervous, petty, socially ambitious, exacting wife. He was generous and indulgent. He scarcely - ever arrived in that house without some little nick-nack for Ella. Everything he did showed consideration and kindness for Antoinette. Then there was Dick, the only child of the household. In the early years, Dick and Ella, in the enormous democracy of childhood, had played together among the swans or in the beautiful gardens that surrounded the home. But Dick had shot up into slim boyhood while Ella was still in rompers. For the past 10 years, the most exciting events in that household had been his all-too-sporadic visits from boarding school and college. Y’ES. there were advantages to remaining at the Frescos’. Antoinette tried to keep this realization stanchly to the front of her mind on those occasions when Mrs. Fresco made life unbearable or when the heavy social routine of the housebold with its luncheons, musicales, teas, dinners, banquets, balls and house parties made the burden of the work and responsibility almost crushing to the slim shoulders of An- toinette. When Mrs. Fresco died one night, in a paroxysm of suffocation, her passing was a source of comment in the social circles of the large cities of both America and Europe. She had succeeded in gouging out what she had most craved for herself—social eminence. As a poor girl she had married Alexander Fresco and, out of a gripping determination, had accom- plished what she had set out to do. There were those who might have thought it not worth the candle, but that is neither here nor there. It is true that in the direction of philanthropic and charitable alleviation of hu- man suffering, except where it had to do con- spicuously with social position, Mrs. Fresco had accomplished little, except her goal. But she had died socially secure. What happened subsequently has happened before and yet it did seem the last word in irony that it should have occurred to the Frescos. As those who had been in the confi- dence of Mrs. Fresco and had known her am- bitions said: “It was enough to make her turn in her grave! Antoinette remained on in the household, conducted it for Mr. Fresco after his wife's death. And what occurred then, it must be said, came as much in the form of a thunder- clap to her as it did to Mr. Fresco and the entire community. When Ella was a beautiful 17 and lovely as the first jonquil that grew in Spring beside the swan lake, Dick Fresco came home from college, a new graduate, eloped with her in an airplane one afternoon and married her in an adjacent city. It fairly took the breath away, not only of the community, but of Antoinette herself, to say nothing of the boy’s dumfounded parent. The young heir to Fresco millions, the young college graduate, just home and prepared to enter into his father’s many activities, had done the unthinkable—married the daughter of a~ servant girl. Strange, with what an imperturbability the Dick Fresco. ruddy, genial father of this nice frank youngster took his blow. The two children were received back into the household. The beautiful little Ella, startled at what she had done, yet crammed with her happiness, was accepted by her father-in-law, and life in the big house moved forward. NOTHING was done to change the status of Antoinette, who by this time was a little gray at the temples of her pretty brown head and who was now occupying the role of house- keeper. Importunings of her daughter, her son- in-law and even Mr. Fresco to the contrary notwithstanding, Antoinette continued to wear a bunch of keys at her belt and to occupy the small room under the eaves. In vain the mem- bers of the family protested, even signifying that she owed it to them to renounce her humble position. But on that Antoinette re- mained obdurate. Her gray alpaca with the sheer organdy touches continued to flash in and out of the great rooms of the great house over which her little daughter was qualified to reign as mistress. There was something strangely tenacious in the benign make-up of the girl Ella. Time after time, in order to solve the curious situation of this household, Antoinette importuned her son- in-law and daughter to let her leave in order to ease the curious dilemma. And there Ella stood obdurate. Painful, excoriating, even humiliating as it was for her to reign mistress in the house where her mother persisted in the role of ser- vant, Ella flatly refused to permit the older woman to leave the Fresco roof. No doubt about it, Antoinette was doing her daughter an injustice by insisting that she re- tain her humble role; no doubt about it, Ella was doing her mother an injustice by refusing to permit her the alternative of leaving the house. And yet, the bond between these two was so close. Years of propinquity between mother and daughter in the humble quarters they had formerly occupied in that home of magnificence had drawn them closely, irre- trievably together. The mere thought of sep- aration was mutually unbearable to them both. The young Dick, buoyantly, youthfully in love, minimized the complication and accepted in embarrassed good humor the role of his mother- in-law, trying to evade its more serious aspect by treating her in a playful manner. “Antoinette, I say, you haven't performed your tasks well this morning,” or, “Antoinette, I am afraid we will have to dispense with your services as housekeeper if you insist upon such familiar manner with Mrs. Fresco.” THESE little witticisms indulged in so good- naturedly by the husband of Ella helped. And yet, not all the facetiousness in the world could save the situation from the curious mix- ture of pathos, irony and absurdity which char- acterized it. Ella felt it. Dick felt it. Antoinette felt it. Certainly the elder Fresco himself must have felt it, although through all the period of these attempts at adjustments he maintained his jovial kind of aloofness, keeping well out of the controversy and exhibiting a non-committal air when called upon to pass judgment. A curious and anomalous situation, if ever there was one. It hurt the tender and pretiy little Ella to sit down at a table at which her own mother was not present. It pained her young and stal- wart husband. It embarrassed Fresco. For months after this marriage the social world that had at one time poured into this house stood off bewildered and dumfounded, and yet there were going on in the financial world rumors that revealed the fact that Alex- ander Fresco in the little time since the death of his wife had practically tripled his many millons. There came a time when, despite the cat- astrophic thing that had happened in that home, the socially exclusive found it the better part of valor to call upon the new little Mrs. Fresco, jr. Cards were left on the silver salvers in the hallway that had been left here, off and on, for years and years, but now that they were applied to little Ella, it fairly took away the breath of Antoinette and her daughter. The time had come for a strategic decision to take place in that household. When the social world had set its stamp of approval finally upon the new little wife of Dick Fresco, it was time to begin to prepare her for the com- plex and difficult role that stretched ahead. THEN something happened that again threw out of focus every single precedent in the home. At ten o'clock one Sunday morning, standing in the superb drawing room ef his home as abashed as a boy of 14, Alexander Fresco asked Antoinette to marry him, At three o'clock that same afternoon by the procedure of special license and special dis- pensation the event of their wedding took place in that same beautiful drawing room, the sole witnesses to the occasion being the servants of the household and Mr. and Mrs. Fresco, jr. It was again a matter of months before a stunned community was able to pull itself to- gether and decide upon its next strategic move in regard to the Frescos. It was again a matter of international com- ment the way in which Alexander Fresco had increased his many millions, and once more society capituiated and began leaving cards for the two Mrs. Frescos. But by this time a new and monopolizing interest had crashed into this household so that the visiting cards lying on the tables had little or no effect. It was not that the Mrs. Frescos, senior and junior, meant to be rude. On the contrary, they were a lovely and amiable pair of matrons. But there was no time. On the day of Alexander Fresco's marriage to Antoin- ette he had made over to her in her own name the sum of five million dollars to do with as she wished. Out of that superbly endowed amount, Antoinette and her daughter Ellen had cooked up a plan., - It was a plan that, as the years moved on, was to grow to such proportions that it monopolized all of their time, leaving little for social concerns that had to do with the visiting cards on the hall table. Mrs. Alexander Fresco, who throughout the lean and hear-breaking years had known deprivation, has built out of her five-million« dollar fund one of the greatest philanthropi¢ organizations in the world. By this time Alexander and his son Dick are almost equally interested in it. The Frescos, all four of them, are a busy, constructive group of people. Too concerned with humanity to find time for the socf\ problems presented by the engraved cards of the elite of the countryside, as they gather dust/ on the hall tables, (Copyright, 1029.) Ice Age and Floods. IT is a long way from the present floods along the Mississippi River back to the Great Ice Age, but happenings of the latter period have considerable bearing on the trials and tribula« tions of the valley dwellers, Before the great fields of ice worked their way down from the north, at least two rivers, the upper Missouri and the Yellowstone, flowed northeast and emptied into Hudson Bay. With the advent of the sheets of ice, however, these two rivers were forced to run to the south, and their combined waters cut the gorge now followed by the Missouri through the Dakotas: At the same time the Red River became & huge pond called glacial Lake Agassiz, with amn outlet to the Minnesota River Valley. Part of the watershed of the Red River became a per- manent source of water for a river flowing to the south and the original head of the Mis- souri River. This river is now known as the James River. With the melting of the great ice dam, the Red River resumed its normal flow to the north, but the others continued to the south. PR The Vain Male. T took nearly a billion dollars to dress the males of the Nation during 1927, at least so far as outergarments were concerned. The census taken that year by the Department of Commerce shows a total production of outer clothing of $932,181,718, which was a slight decrease of 1.5 per cent over the last preceding census year, The greater part of the manufacture is cene tered in 10 cities—New York, Philadelphia, Chie cago, Rochester, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Bostomw and Cleveland. 4