Edgham heard the remark, and his face took on a set expression which it could assume at times. He did not like his sister-in-law, although he disguised the fact. She was very useful. His meals were always on time, the house was as neatly kept as before, and Maria was being trained as she had never been in household duties.
Maria was obedient, under silent protest, to her aunt. Often, after she had been bidden to perform some household task, and obeyed, she had gone to her own room and wept, and told herself that her mother would never have put such things on her. She had no one in whom to confide. She was not a girl to have unlimited intimates among other girls at school. She was too self-centred, and, if the truth were told, too emulative.
“Maria Edgham thinks she's awful smart,” one girl would say to another. They all admitted, even the most carping, that Maria was pretty. “Maria Edgham is pretty enough, and she knows it,” said they. She was in the high school, even at her age, and she stood high in her classes. There was always a sort of moral strike going on against Maria, as there is against all superiority, especially when the superiority is known to be recognized by the possessor thereof.
In spite of her prettiness, she was not a favorite even among the boys. They were, as a rule, innocent as well as young, but they would rather have snatched a kiss from such a pretty, dainty little creature than have had her go above them in the algebra class. It did not seem fitting. Without knowing it, they were envious. They would not even acknowledge her cleverness, not even Wollaston Lee, for whom Maria entertained a rudimentary affection. He was even rude to her.
“Maria Edgham is awful stuck up,” he told his mother. He was of that age when a boy tells his mother a good deal, and he was an only child.
“She's a real pretty little girl, and her aunt says she is a good girl,” replied his mother, who regarded the whole as the antics of infancy.
The Lees lived near the Edghams, on the same street, and Mrs. Lee and Aunt Maria had exchanged several calls. They were, in fact, almost intimate. The Lees were at the supper-table when Wollaston made his deprecatory remark concerning Maria, and he had been led to do so by the law of sequence. Mrs. Lee had made a remark about Aunt Maria to her husband. “I believe she thinks Harry Edgham will marry her,” she said.
“That's just like you women, always trumping up something of that kind,” replied her husband. His words were rather brusque, but he regarded, while speaking them, his wife with adoration. She was a very pretty woman, and looked much younger than her age.
“You needn't tell me,” said Mrs. Lee. “She's just left off bonnets and got a new hat trimmed with black daisies; rather light mourning, I call it, when her sister has not been dead a year.”
“You spiteful little thing!” said her husband, still with his adoring eyes on his wife.
“Well, it's so, anyway.”
“Well, she would make Harry a good wife, I guess,” said her husband, easily; “and she would think more of the girl.”
It was then that Wollaston got in his remark about poor Maria, who had herself noticed with wonder that her aunt had bought a new hat that spring instead of a bonnet.
“Why, Aunt Maria, I thought you always wore a bonnet!” said she, innocently, when the hat came home from the milliner's.
“Nobody except old women are wearing bonnets now,” replied her aunt, shortly. “I saw Mrs. Rufus Jones, who is a good deal older than I, at church Sunday with a hat trimmed with roses. The milliner told me nobody of my age wore a bonnet.”
“Did she know how old you really are, Aunt Maria?” inquired Maria with the utmost innocence.
Harry Edgham gave a little chuckle, then came to his sister-in-law's rescue. He had a thankful heart for even small benefits, and Aunt Maria had done a good deal for him and his, and it had never occurred to him that the doing might not be entirely disinterested. Besides, Aunt Maria had always seemed to him, as well as to his daughter, very old indeed. It might have been that the bonnets had had something to do with it. Aunt Maria had never affected fashions beyond a certain epoch, partly from economy, partly from a certain sense of injury. She had said to herself that she was old, she had been passed by; she would dress as one who had. Now her sentiments underwent a curious change. The possibility occurred to her that Harry might ask her to take her departed sister's place. She was older than that sister, much older than he, but she looked in her glass and suddenly her passed youth seemed to look forth upon her. The revival of hopes sometimes serves as a tonic. Aunt Maria actually did look younger than she had done, even with her scanty frizzes. She regarded other women, not older than herself, with pompadours, and aspiration seized her.
One day she went to New York shopping. She secretly regarded that as an expedition. She was terrified at the crossings. Stout, elderly woman as she was, when she found herself in the whirl of the great city, she became as a small, scared kitten. She gathered up her skirts, and fled incontinently across the streets, with policemen looking after her with haughty disapprobation. But when she was told to step lively on the trolley-cars, her true self asserted its endurance. “I am not going to step in front of a team for you or any other person,” she told one conductor, and she spoke with such emphasis that even he was intimidated, and held the car meekly until the team had passed. When Aunt Maria came home from New York that particular afternoon, she had an expression at once of defiance and embarrassment, which both Maria and her father noticed.
“Well, what did you see in New York, Maria?” asked Harry, pleasantly.
“I saw the greatest lot of folks without manners, that I ever saw in my whole life,” replied Aunt Maria, sharply.
Harry Edgham laughed. “You'll get used to it,” he said, easily. “Everybody who comes from New England has to take time to like New York. It is an acquired taste.”
“When I do acquire it, I'll be equal to any of them,” replied Aunt Maria. “When I lose my temper, they had better look out.”
Harry Edgham laughed again.
It was the next morning when Aunt Maria appeared at the early breakfast with a pompadour. Her thin frizzes were carefully puffed over a mystery which she had purchased the afternoon before.
Maria, when she first saw her aunt, stared open-mouthed; then she ate her breakfast as if she had seen nothing.
Harry Edgham gave one sharp stare at his sister-in-law, then he said: “Got your hair done up a new way, haven't you, Maria?”
“Yes, my hat didn't set well on my head with my hair the way I was wearing it,” replied Aunt Maria with dignity; still she blushed. She knew that her own hair did not entirely conceal the under structure, and she knew, too, why she wore the pompadour.
Harry Edgham recognized the first fact with simple pity that his sister-in-law's hair was so thin. He remembered hearing a hair-tonic recommended by another man in the office, and he wondered privately if Maria would feel hurt if he brought some for her. Of the other fact he had not the least suspicion. He said: “Well, it's real becoming to you, Maria. I guess I like it better than the other way. I notice all the girls seem to wear their hair so nowadays.”
Aunt Maria smiled at him gratefully. When her sister had married him, she had wondered what on earth she saw in Harry Edgham; now he seemed to her a very likeable man.
When Maria sat in school that morning, her aunt's pompadour diverted her mind from her book; then she caught
