or whatever, I put my foot down, and kept it down. I guess her mother was willing enough to do my way, but her sister was all for some of those colleges where girls are educated with other girls and not with young men. She said they were more ladylike, and a lot more stuff and nonsense, and were more likely to be fit for society. She said this one would meet a lot of jays, and very likely fall in love with one; and when we first heard of this affair of Peggy's I don't believe but what her sister got more satisfaction out of it than I did. She's quick enough! And a woman likes to feel that she's a prophetess at any time of her life. That's about all that seems to keep some of them going when they get old.” I knew that here he had his mother-in-law rather than his daughter in mind, and I didn't interrupt the sarcastic silence into which he fell. “You've never met the young man, I believe?” he asked, at quite another point, and to the negation of my look he added, “To be sure! We've hardly met him ourselves; he's only been here once; but you'll see him—you and Mrs. Temple. Well!” He lifted his head, as if he were going away, but he did not lift his arms from the fence, and so I knew that he had not emptied the bag of his unexpected confidences; I did not know why he was making them to me, but I liked him the better for them, and tried to feel that I was worthy of them. He began with a laugh, “They both paid it into me so,” and now I knew that he meant his eldest daughter as well as her grandmother, “that my wife turned round and took my part, and said it was the very best thing that could happen; and she used all the arguments that I had used with her, when she had her misgivings about it, and she didn't leave them a word to say. A curious thing about it was, that though my arguments seemed to convince them, they didn't convince me. Ever notice, 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
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
