Mrs. Thropp felt that it was only right to tell Jim as much as she
could about his new family. She told him for hours and hours. She
described people he had never seen or heard of and would travel many
a mile to avoid. He had never cared for genealogy, and his own long
and brilliant ancestry did not interest him in the slightest. He had
hundreds of relations of all degrees of fame and fortune, and he
felt under no further obligation to them than to let alone and be
let alone.
His interest in his new horde of relations-in-law was vastly less
than nothing. But Mrs. Thropp gave him their names, their ages,
habits, diseases, vices, mannerisms, idiosyncrasies. She recounted
doings and sayings of infinite unimportance and uninterest.
With the fatuous, blindfolded enthusiasm of an after-dinner speaker
who rambles on and on and on while the victims yawn, groan, or fold
their napkins and silently steal away, Mrs. Thropp poured out her
lethal anecdotes.
Jim went from weariness to restiveness, to amazement, to wrath,
to panic, to catalepsy, before Kedzie realized that he was being
suffocated by these reminiscences. Then she intervened.
Mrs. Thropp's final cadence was a ghastly thought:
"Well, now, I've told you s'much about all our folks, you must tell
me all about yours."
"The Lord forbid!" said Jim.
Mrs. Thropp took this to mean that he did not dare confess the
scandals of his people. She knew, of course, from reading, that rich
people are very wicked, but she did want to know some of the details.
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