The Whole Family. Генри Джеймс

how when another person repeats what you've said, it sounds kind of weak and foolish?” I owned that my reasons had at times some such way of turning against me from the mouths of others, and he went on: “But they seemed to silence her own misgivings, and she's been enthusiastic for the engagement ever since. What's the reason,” he asked, “why a man, if he's any way impetuous, wants to back out of a situation just about the time a woman has got set in it like the everlasting hills? Is it because she feels the need of holding fast for both, or is it because she knows she hasn't the strength to keep to her conclusion, if she wavers at all, while a man can let himself play back and forth, and still stay put.”

      “Well, in a question like that,” I said, and I won my neighbor's easy laugh, “I always like to give my own sex the benefit of the doubt, and I haven't any question but man's inconsistency is always attributable to his magnanimity.”

      

      “I guess I shall have to put that up on the doctor,” my neighbor said, as he lifted his arms from the fence at last, and backed away from it. I knew that he was really going in-doors now, and that I must come out with what was in my mind, if I meant to say it at all, and so I said, “By-the-way, there's something. You know I don't go in much for what's called society journalism, especially in the country press, where it mostly takes the form of 'Miss Sadie Myers is visiting with Miss Mamie Peters,' but I realize that a country paper nowadays must be a kind of open letter to the neighborhood, and I suppose you have no objection to my mentioning the engagement?”

      This made Mr. Talbert look serious; and I fancy my proposition made him realize the affair as he had not before, perhaps. After a moment's pause, he said, “Well! That's something I should like to talk with my wife about.”

      “Do so!” I applauded. “I only suggest it—or chiefly, or partly—because you can have it reach our public in just the form you want, and the Rochester and Syracuse papers will copy my paragraph; but if you leave it to their Eastridge correspondents—”

      “That's true,” he assented. “I'll speak to Mrs. Talbert—” He walked so inconclusively away that I was not surprised to have him turn and come back before I left my place. “Why, certainly! Make the announcement! It's got to come out. It's a kind of a wrench, thinking of it as a public affair; because a man's daughter is always a little girl to him, and he can't realize—And this one—But of course!”

      “Would you like to suggest any particular form of words?” I hesitated.

      “Oh no! Leave that to you entirely. I know we can trust you not to make any blare about it. Just say that they were fellow-students—I should like that to be known, so that people sha'n't think I don't like to have it known—and that he's looking forward to a professorship in the same college—How queer it all seems!”

      “Very well, then, I'll announce it in our next. There's time to send me word if Mrs. Talbert has any suggestions.”

      “All right. But she won't have any. Well, good-evening.”

      “Good-evening,” I said from my side of the fence; and when I had watched him definitively in-doors, I turned and walked into my own house.

      The first thing my wife said was, “You haven't asked him to let you announce it in the Banner?”

      “But I have, though!”

      “Well!” she gasped.

      “What is the matter?” I demanded. “It's a public affair, isn't it?”

      “It's a family affair—”

      “Well, I consider the readers of the Banner a part of the family.”

II. THE OLD-MAID AUNT, by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

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      I am relegated here in Eastridge to the position in which I suppose I properly belong, and I dare say it is for my best spiritual and temporal good. Here I am the old-maid aunt. Not a day, not an hour, not a minute, when I am with other people, passes that I do not see myself in their estimation playing that role as plainly as if I saw myself in a looking-glass. It is a moral lesson which I presume I need. I have just returned from my visit at the Pollards' country-house in Lancaster, where I most assuredly did not have it. I do not think I deceive myself. I know it is the popular opinion that old maids are exceedingly prone to deceive themselves concerning the endurance of their youth and charms, and the views of other people with regard to them. But I am willing, even anxious, to be quite frank with myself. Since—well, never mind since what time—I have not cared an iota whether I was considered an old maid or not. The situation has seemed to me rather amusing, inasmuch as it has involved a secret willingness to be what everybody has considered me as very unwilling to be. I have regarded it as a sort of joke upon other people.

      But I think I am honest—I really mean to be, and I think I am—when I say that outside Eastridge the role of an old-maid aunt is the very last one which I can take to any advantage. Here I am estimated according to what people think I am, rather than what I actually am. In the first place, I am only fifteen years older than Peggy, who has just become engaged, but those fifteen years seem countless aeons to the child herself and the other members of the family. I am ten years younger than my brother's wife, but she and my brother regard me as old enough to be her mother. As for Grandmother Evarts, she fairly looks up to me as her superior in age, although she DOES patronize me. She would patronize the prophets of old. I don't believe she ever says her prayers without infusing a little patronage into her petitions. The other day Grandmother Evarts actually inquired of me, of ME! concerning a knitting-stitch. I had half a mind to retort, “Would you like a lesson in bridge, dear old soul?” She never heard of bridge, and I suppose she would have thought I meant bridge-building. I sometimes wonder why it is that all my brother's family are so singularly unsophisticated, even Cyrus himself, able as he is and dear as he is.

      Sometimes I speculate as to whether it can be due to the mansard-roof of their house. I have always had a theory that inanimate things exerted more of an influence over people than they dreamed, and a mansard-roof, to my mind, belongs to a period which was most unsophisticated and fatuous, not merely concerning aesthetics, but simple comfort. Those bedrooms under the mansard-roof are miracles not only of ugliness, but discomfort, and there is no attic. I think that a house without a good roomy attic is like a man without brains. Possibly living in a brainless house has affected the mental outlook of my relatives, although their brains are well enough. Peggy is not exactly remarkable for hers, but she is charmingly pretty, and has a wonderful knack at putting on her clothes, which might be esteemed a purely feminine brain, in her fingers. Charles Edward really has brains, although he is a round peg in a square hole, and as for Alice, her brains are above the normal, although she unfortunately knows it, and Billy, if he ever gets away from Alice, will show what he is made of. Maria's intellect is all right, although cast in a petty mould. She repeats Grandmother Evarts, which is a pity, because there are types not worth repeating. Maria if she had not her husband Tom to manage, would simply fall on her face. It goes hard with a purely patronizing soul when there is nobody to manage; there is apt to be an explosion. However, Maria HAS Tom. But none of my brother's family, not even my dear sister-in-law, Cyrus's wife, have the right point of view with regard to the present, possibly on account of the mansard-roof which has overshadowed them. They do not know that today an old-maid aunt is as much of an anomaly as a spinning-wheel, that she has ceased to exist, that she is prehistoric, that even grandmothers have almost disappeared from off the face of the earth. In short, they do not know that I am not an old-maid aunt except under this blessed mansard-roof, and some other roofs of Eastridge, many of which are also mansard, where the influence of their fixed belief prevails. For instance, they told the people next door, who