The indigo crop a failure, their efforts to granulate sugar a failure, they were faced with ruin, complete and absolute. Then came Etienne de Boré and several black Dominicans, among them Jean’s great-grandfather. Days of anxious experimentation. Days of hope. Days of failure. The day of the final test. The exultant cry, “It granulates!” Prosperity beyond the wildest dream. Four—five—seven years. Five million pounds of sugar marketed in one year by de Boré. Always Jean ended the story: “And that was done, my dear, by my great-grandfather—a Negro from San Domingo!” For the first year she succeeded in refraining from the comment that always came to her lips when she heard the story. It was: “And what about you, Jean Daquin, exhibiting some of your great-grandfather’s initiative?” And it was a long time before she could get used to pronouncing his name other than as “Gene Da-Kwinn.”
In time, however, Mme. Daquin tired even of the elaborately carved old four-posted mahogany beds, so high that one used a step to climb into them. Even the old silver, the garden, lost their fresh charm as she grew used to them. Like new toys they fascinated her for a while and, with her love for Jean, her mild affection for Mimi and her new duties, her mind was kept free from Jean’s backwardness and the continued coolness of Jean’s friends towards her. But when this newness wore off she began, at first gently and then with increasing vigour, to point out to him the opportunities for gain he was overlooking. At the same time she began to long for the progressiveness and bustle and eager hurrying of her own Chicago.
Jean at the beginning of her first mild reproaches sought gently to argue with her. He tried to convince her of the charm of the old ways, to prove to her that maximum happiness for them would come not with larger resources that created new anxieties but only in the easygoing undisturbed lethargy of his old life.