Michael Malone - Weebly

generations of Dingleys had never toiled, scrimped,
underbought, and oversold, never wrested land from
the Indians and income from the land, never risen by
their bootstraps and stamped out the competition, never
merged, cornered, and capitalized, never been selfmade
at all, but in the mythic memory of a great dream.
For what remained of so much private enterprise? Only
a pass. A piece of paper that entitled Beanie (and her
immediate family)
to ride without charge in a public compartment of
those trains, to ride to and from wherever the trains
happened to be going anyhow. That was all. She
couldn't even treat by any inherited la droit madame
her best friends, Tracy, Evelyn, and Priss, to a free seat
on her train when they took their regular Wednesday
journeys to the market of Art. No, the Thespian Ladies
had to pay full fare. Had to pay to ride on tracks that
Beanie's great-great-grandfather, Charles Bradford
Dingley II, had sledgehammered through Connecticut
rock, with, he used to say, his own bloody hands. On a
train that he had shoved up hill, down vale, with his own
sweaty shoulder to the wheel, Beatrice, his last heiress,