Hudson River Bracketed by Edith Wharton

The summer light lay so rightly on the lawn and trees of the Willows that Halo Tarrant understood more clearly than ever before the spell the place had cast on Vance Weston.

She had gone there to take a look, for the first time in months. The present owner, the old and infirm Miss Lorburn, sat in her house in Stuyvesant Square and fretted about her inability to keep an eye on the place; she always said what a pity it was that poor Tom hadn't left it to poor Halo instead of to her. Miss Lorburn's world was peopled with friends and relatives who seemed to her best described by the epithet "poor"; what with one thing or another, she thought them all objects of pity. It was only of herself, old, heavy, with blurred eyes, joints knotted by rheumatism, legs bloated by varicose veins, and her GOOD ear beginning to go, that she never spoke with compassion. She merely said it was a pity poor Halo would have to wait so long for the Willows. not that it would be much use to the poor child when she did get it, if the value of property at Paul's Landing continued to decline at its present rate.