Note 62 — Chapter Thirty-eight

... that evening, when I arrived home from having supper with Steve and Claire, who were both in a great state of excitement over my son’s impending aeroplane venture which Henry and David had just made possible, I was met at the door by Winslow with the overwhelming news that Father had just telephoned out that Henry and Henriette had been married. And indeed you must add, lived happy ever after. With a chivalry that almost passeth the telling, and at a time when under the conditions, it almost amounted to foolhardiness, my brother took over what had hitherto been the prim little life of Henriette Simpson. While she was never again to be robust, and all the remainder of her life was to be subject to fainting-spells, against which my brother was on constant guard, she was destined to outlive many of those of her own generation about her.

For four years subsequent to their marriage, they remained in the home of my parents, the Igrotte place, which has since burned to the ground.

After the death of my parents, my brother and his wife spent the greater part of each year in Washington, where they had an apartment in H Street.

It was in this apartment that my sister-in-law Henrietta died of a singular and distressing accident.

Leaning out of the thirty-ninth-story window of the fine building in H Street, Level II, one morning, to wave my brother au-revoir, as was her invariable habit, she turned in the window-frame to look up at him, as his little two-passenger aeroplane slid from the hangar atop the building, just as the heavy window-sash gave way and fell across her chest, killing her instantly.