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The Spender house was spacious, painted white with colored awnings over the windows, the long marble-flagged terrace led down to a swimming pool, the neighbors were hidden by rows of flowering eucalyptus and the wide garage held three cars. Arnold Spender was rich had always been rich as his father before him and his father before him. Beyond that generation the tracing was lost, as his wife Susannah too often mentioned during rounds of family-tree accounting. Nevertheless he belonged-she always conceded-since his ancestors on his mother’s side were pioneers like her own, one of whom crossed the Delaware with George Washington and another died as a young lieutenant at Valley Forge. They should be living in Boston or New York, Susannah constantly complained, instead of being surrounded by the nouveaux rich of Long Beach. She was all snob whereas Arnold was only part snob, a bright and successful petroleum engineer who still retained the flavor of his Ivy League days at Harvard.
Who they were and what they were, these were the ever repeated legends of themselves instilled in their daughter, their own little Princess as they called her. They scoffed at the idea of a generation gap in their closely united family, forgetting that the younger generation that lived at Long Beach was beyond their comprehension. Their friends were older or seemed older than themselves, but were usually as rich, belonging to the same clubs and having much the same interests. In this circle the young Linda was nurtured and brought up in the belief that she had inherited the earth.
Fictional reading for entertainment purposes only.