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respectably and nice, but there was no show. They had made a great deal of money. Four or five of them had gone out and built what the local judge had pointed out to me when he spoke of it “palaces, lady, palaces!” They had built for themselves palaces - very ostentatious houses on the outskirts. Not all of them had done that, but one or two had. A couple of them had outgrown their good old wives - the village girls that they had married when young. They met somebody in New York who was a little more blonde and a little more stylish and they put on airs like nothing at all. Drink had found its way into the community for the first time as a social medium.
All this had created dislike, the raising of eyebrows and the shrugging of shoulders on the part of very good substantial old Rome people, who were by no means associating themselves with the workers in their thinking, but didn't like the goings on that were taking place.
Among these people was a newcomer to the town - within the generation of twenty-odd years - who had gotten very rich on the rise in the price of copper and had never fully associated himself with the community. They had never felt that he was one of them. That was a man named Spargo. I don't know what his family was, who he was or where he came from.
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