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Aunt Sharley was hardly a fit candidate for canonisation yet. Either it was too early for that–or it was too late. She was unreasonable, she was crotchety, she was contentious, she was incredibly intolerant of the opinions of others, and she was incredibly hardheaded. She had always been masterful and arrogant; now more and more each day she was becoming a shrew and a tyrant and a wrangler. She was frightfully noisy; she clarioned her hallelujah hymns at the top of her voice, regardless of what company might be in the house. She dipped snuff openly before friends of the girls and new acquaintances alike. She refused point-blank to wear a cap and apron when serving meals. She was forever quarrelling with the neighbours’ servants, with delivery boys, with marketmen and storekeepers. By sheer obstinacy she defeated all their plans for hiring a second servant, declaring that if they dared bring another darky on the place she would take pleasure in scalding the interloper with a kettle of boiling water. She sat in self-imposed judgment upon their admirers, ruthlessly rejecting those courtiers who did not measure up to her arbitrary standards for appraising the local aristocracy; and toward such of the young squires as fell under the ban of her disfavour she deported herself in such fashion as to leave in their minds no doubt whatsoever regarding her hostility. In public she praised her wards; in private she alternately scolded and petted them. She was getting more feeble, now that age and infirmities were coming upon her, wherefore the house showed the lack of proper care. They were afraid of her, though they loved her with all their hearts and knew she loved them to the exclusion of every living person; they were apprehensive always of her frequent and unrestrained outbreaks of temper. She shamed them and she humiliated them and she curbed them in perfectly natural impulses–impulses that to them seemed perfectly proper also.

Small enough were these faults when set up alongside the tally of her goodnesses; moreover, neither of the two rebels against her authority was lacking in gratitude. But it is the small things that are most annoying usually, and, besides, the faults of the old woman were things now of daily occurrence and recurrence, which chafed their nerves and fretted them, whereas the passage of time was lessening the sentimental value of her earlier labours and sacrifices in their behalf.

And here was another thing: While they had been getting older Aunt Sharley had been getting old; they had grown up, overnight, as it were, and she could not be made to comprehend the fact. In their case the eternal conflict between youth and crabbed age was merely being repeated–with the addition in this particular instance of unusual complications.

For an hour or more the perplexed pair threshed away, striving to winnow the chaff from the pure grain in Aunt Sharley’s nature, and the upshot was that Emmy Lou had a headache and Mildred had a little spell of crying, and they agreed that never had there been such a paradox of part saint and part sinner, part black ogre and part black angel, as their Auntie was, created into a troubled world, and that something should be done to remedy the evil, provided it could be done without grievously hurting the old woman’s feelings; but just what this something which should be done might be neither of them could decide, and so they went to bed and to sleep.

And the next day was another day exactly similar in its petty annoyances to the day before.

But a day was to come before the summer ended when a way out was found. The person who found the way out–or thought he did–was Mr. Harvey Winslow, the hero or villain of the hammock episode previously described in this narrative. He did not venture, though, to suggest a definite course of action until after a certain moonlit, fragrant night, when two happy young people agreed that thereafter these twain should be one.