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The James'


Her name was Augusta James, the youngest daughter of Edward James. This man was a thoroughly Victorian man, somehow misplaced into the twentieth century. His grandfather had been part of the English merchant nobility � in spirit, rather than in name. He had bred military bearing and hard English attitudes into his children. His wife had been the epitome of the Victorian wife. Proud and stately, she kept to herself and maintained a quiet order over the house by not inserting any marital difficulties or demands on the staff and her family. She was slightly anemic and took to her room for weeks on end. While others would have been content to be merely scandalous, she was set on being the only woman of her rank to die so young. She did die, after an imagined bout with appendicitis, stomach flu and nausea, by reaching for her pills and drinking them all down, with a healthy dose of spirits. Two daughters became elderly spinsters because of their reluctance to marry into the shallow blood of London new money in the early 1900s; his sons became disappointing drunkards, sailors and criminal pimps. His eldest son, however, was the star of his family. He was outstanding and powerful where the rest were not. He would not be moved in his ways, and so when it came to his own children, he was like the grandfather of the clan � his eldest son came to be exactly like him. His own wife had spoiled all the children, but his continuing retribution on all that opposed him left her depressed and weak; her yearning to be a hot young flapper murdered by his tightened hold over her economic well-being. Loose money led to loose morals, he always said. So, Mr. Edward James, like his father, and his grandfather, learned that oppression was good, and living life, bad.