“Well, of course! And her being away at school made it all the more so.
If we'd had her under our eye, here--Well, we shouldn't have had her
under our eye if she had BEEN here; or if we had, we shouldn't have seen
what was going on; at least _I_ shouldn't; maybe her mother would. So
it's just as well it happened as it did happen, I guess. We shouldn't
have been any the wiser if we'd known all about it.” I joined him in his
laugh at his paradox, and he began again. “What's that about being the
unexpected that happens? I guess what happens is what ought to have
been expected. We might have known when we let her go to a coeducational
college that we were taking a risk of losing her; but we lost our other
daughter that way, and SHE never went to ANY kind of college. I guess we
counted the chances before we let her go. What's the use? Of course
we did, and I remember saying to my wife, who's more anxious than I am
about most things--women are, I guess--that if the worst came to the
worst, it might not be such a bad thing. I always thought it wasn't
such an objectionable feature, in the coeducational system, if the young
people did get acquainted under it, and maybe so well acquainted that
they didn't want to part enemies in the end. I said to my wife that I
didn't see how, if a girl was going to get married, she could have a
better basis than knowing the fellow through three or four years' hard
work together. When you think of the sort of hit-or-miss affairs most
marriages are that young people make after a few parties and picnics,
coeducation as a preliminary to domestic happiness doesn't seem a bad
notion.”
“There's something in what you say,” I assented.
“Of course there is,” my neighbor insisted. “I couldn't help laughing,
though,” and he laughed, as if to show how helpless he had been, “at
what my wife said. She said she guessed if it came to that they would
get to know more of each other's looks than they did of their minds. She
had me there, but I don't think my girl has made out so very poorly even
as far as books are concerned.”
Upon this invitation to praise her, I ventured to say, “A young lady of
Miss Talbert's looks doesn't need much help from books.”
I could see that what I had said pleased him to the core, though he put
on a frown of disclaimer in replying, “I don't know about her looks.
She's a GOOD girl, though, and that's the main thing, I guess.”
“For her father, yes, but other people don't mind her being pretty,” I
persisted. “My wife says when Miss Talbert comes out into the garden,
the other flowers have no chance.”
“Good for Mrs. Temple!” my neighbor shouted, joyously giving himself
away.
I have always noticed that when you praise a girl's beauty to her
father, though he makes a point of turning it off in the direction of
her goodness, he likes so well to believe she is pretty that he cannot
hold out against any persistence in the admirer of her beauty. My
neighbor now said with the effect of tasting a peculiar sweetness in my
words, “I guess I shall have to tell my wife, that.” Then he added, with
a rush of hospitality, “Won't you come in and tell her yourself?”
“Not now, thank you. It's about our tea-time.”
“Glad it isn't your DINNER-time!” he said, heartily.
“Well, yes. We don't see the sense of dining late in a place like this.
The fact is, we're both village-bred, and we like the mid-day dinner. We
make rather a high tea, though.”
“So do we. I always want a dish of something hot. My wife thinks cake is
light, but I think meat is.”
“Well, cake is the New England superstition,” I observed. “And I suppose
York State, too.”
“Yes, more than pie is,” he agreed. “For supper, anyway. You may have
pie at any or all of the three meals, but you have GOT to have cake
at tea, if you are anybody at all. In the place where my wife lived, a
woman's social standing was measured by the number of kinds of cake she
had.”
We laughed at that, too, and then there came a little interval and I
said, “Your place is looking fine.”
He turned his head and gave it a comprehensive stare. “Yes, it is,” he
admitted. “They tell me it's an ugly old house, and I guess if my girls,
counting my daughter-in-law, had their way, they would have that French
roof off, and something Georgian--that's what they call it--on, about as
quick as the carpenter could do it. They want a kind of classic front,
with pillars and a pediment; or more the Mount Vernon style, body
yellow, with white trim. They call it Georgian after Washington?” This
was obviously a joke.
“No, I believe it was another George, or four others. But I don't
wonder you want to keep your house as it is. It expresses something
characteristic.” I saved myself by forbearing to say it was handsome. It
was, in fact, a vast, gray-green wooden edifice, with a mansard-roof cut
up into many angles, tipped at the gables with rockets and finials, and
with a square tower in front, ending in a sort of lookout at the top,
with a fence of iron filigree round it. The taste of 1875 could not go
further; it must have cost a heap of money in the depreciated paper of
the day.
I suggested something of the kind to my neighbor, and he laughed. “I
guess it cost all we had at the time. We had been saving along up, and
in those days it used to be thought that the best investment you could
make was to put your money in a house of your own. That's what we did,
anyway. I had just got to be superintendent of the Works, and I don't
say but what we felt my position a little. Well, we felt it more than we
did when I got to be owner.” He laughed in good-humored self-satire. “My
wife used to say we wanted a large house so as to have it big enough to
hold me, when I was feeling my best, and we built the largest we could
for all the money we had. She had a plan of her own, which she took
partly from the house of a girl friend of hers where she had been
visiting, and we got a builder to carry out her idea. We did have
some talk about an architect, but the builder said he didn't want any
architect bothering around HIM, and I don't know as SHE did, either.
Her idea was plenty of chambers and plenty of room in them, and two big
parlors one side of the front door, and a library and dining-room on
the other; kitchen in the L part, and girl's room over that; wide
front hall, and black-walnut finish all through the first floor. It was
considered the best house at the time in Eastridge, and I guess it was.
But now, I don't say but what it's old-fashioned. I have to own up to
that with the girls, but I tell them so are we, and that seems to make
it all right for a while. I guess we sha'n't change.”
He continued to stare at the simple-hearted edifice, so simple-hearted
in its out-dated pretentiousness, and then he turned and leaned over the
top of the fence where he had left his arms lying, while contemplating
the early monument of his success. In making my journalistic study, more
or less involuntary, of Eastridge, I had put him down as materially the
first man of the place; I might have gone farther and put him down as
the first man intellectually. We folk who have to do more constantly
with reading and writing are apt to think that the other folk who have
more to do with making and marketing have not so much mind, but I fancy
we make a mistake in that now and then. It is only another kind of mind
which they have quite as much of as we have of ours. It was intellectual
force that built up the Plated-Ware Works of Eastridge, where there
was no other reason for their being, and it was mental grip that held
constantly to the management, and finally grasped the ownership. Nobody
ever said that Talbert had come unfairly into that, or that he had
misused his money in buying men after he began to come into it in
quantity. He was felt in a great many ways, though he made something of
a point of not being prominent in politics, after being president of
the village two terms. The minister of his church was certainly such a
preacher as he liked; and nothing was done in the church society without
him; he gave the town a library building, and a soldier's monument; he
was foremost in getting the water brought in, which was natural enough
since he needed it the most; he took a great interest in school matters,
and had a fight to keep himself off the board of education; he went into
his pocket for village improvements whenever he was asked, and he was
the chief contributor to the public fountain under the big elm. If he
carefully, or even jealously guarded his own interests, and held the
leading law firm in the hollow of his hand, he was not oppressive, to
the general knowledge. He was a despot, perhaps, but he was Blackstone's
ideal of the head of a state, a good despot. In all his family relations
he was of the exemplary perfection which most other men attain only on
their tombstones, and I had found him the best of neighbors. There were
some shadows of diffidence between the ladies of our families, mainly on
the part of my wife, but none between Talbert and me. He showed me, as
a newspaper man with ideals if not abilities rather above the average, a
deference which pleased my wife, even more than me.
It was the married daughter whom she most feared might, if occasion
offered, give herself more consequence than her due. She had tried to
rule her own family while in her father's house, and now though she
had a house of her own, my wife believed that she had not wholly
relinquished her dominion there. Her husband was the junior member of
the law firm which Talbert kept in his pay, to the exclusion of most
other clients, and he was a very good fellow, so far as I knew, with
the modern conception of his profession which, in our smaller towns and
cities, has resulted in corporation lawyers and criminal lawyers, and
has left to a few aging attorneys the faded traditions and the scanty
affairs of the profession. My wife does not mind his standing somewhat
in awe of his father-in-law, but she thinks poorly of his spirit in
relation to that managing girl he has married. Talbert's son is in the
business with him, and will probably succeed him in it; but it is well
known in the place that he will never be the man his father is, not
merely on account of his college education, but also on account of the
easy temperament, which if he had indulged it to the full would have
left him no better than some kind of artist. As it is, he seems to leave
all the push to his father; he still does some sketching outside, and
putters over the aesthetic details in the business, the new designs
for the plated ware, and the illustrated catalogues which the house
publishes every year; I am in hopes that we shall get the printing,
after we have got the facilities. It would be all right with the young
man in the opinion of his censors if he had married a different kind of
woman, but young Mrs. Talbert is popularly held just such another as her
husband, and easy-going to the last degree. She was two or three years
at the Art Students' League, and it was there that her husband met her
before they both decided to give up painting and get married.
The two youngest children, or the fall chickens as they are called in
recognition of the wide interval between their ages and those of the
other children, are probably of the indeterminate character proper to
their years. We think the girl rather inclines to a hauteur based upon
the general neglect of that quality in the family, where even the
eldest sister is too much engaged in ruling to have much force left for
snubbing. The child carries herself with a vague loftiness, which has
apparently not awaited the moment of long skirts for keeping pretenders
to her favor at a distance. In the default of other impertinents to
keep in abeyance we fancy that she exercises her gift upon her younger
brother, who, so far as we have been able to note, is of a disposition
which would be entirely sweet if it were not for the exasperations he
suffers from her. I like to put myself in his place, and to hold that
he believes himself a better judge than she of the sort of companions he
chooses, she being disabled by the mental constitution of her sex, and
the defects of a girl's training, from knowing the rare quality of boys
who present themselves even to my friendly eyes as dirty, and, when not
patched, ragged. I please myself in my guesses at her character with the
conjecture that she is not satisfied with her sister's engagement to a
fellow-student in a co-educational college, who is looking forward to a
professorship.
In spite of her injustice in regard to his own companions, this
imaginable attitude of hers impresses the boy, if I understand boys. I
have no doubt he reasons that she must be right about something, and as
she is never right about boys, she must be right about brothers-in-law,
potential if not actual. This one may be, for all the boy knows, a
sissy; he inclines to believe, from what he understands of the matter,
that he is indeed a sissy, or he would never have gone to a college
where half the students are girls. He himself, as I have heard, intends
to go to a college, but whether Harvard, or Bryant's Business College,
he has not yet decided. One thing he does know, though, and that is
there are not going to be any girls in it. We have not allowed our
invention so great play in regard to the elder members of our neighbor's
family perhaps because we really know something more about them. Mrs.
Talbert duly called after We came to Eastridge, and when my wife had
self-respectfully waited a proper time, which she made a little more
than a week lest she should feel that she had been too eager for the
acquaintance, she returned the call. Then she met not only Mrs. Talbert,
but Mrs. Talbert's mother, who lives with them, in an anxiety for their
health which would impair her own if she were not of a constitution
such as you do not find in these days of unladylike athletics. She was
inclined to be rather strict with my wife about her own health, and mine
too, and told her she must be careful not to let me work too hard, or
overeat, or leave off my flannels before the weather was settled in the
spring. She said she had heard that I had left a very good position on
a Buffalo paper when I bought the Eastridge Banner, and that the town
ought to feel very much honored. My wife suppressed her conviction that
this was the correct view of the case, in a deprecatory expression
of our happiness in finding ourselves in Eastridge, and our entire
satisfaction with our prospects and surroundings. Then Mrs. Talbert's
mother inquired, as delicately as possible, what denominations,
religious and medical, we were of, how many children we had, and whether
mostly boys or girls, and where and how long we had been married. She
was glad, she said, that we had taken the place next them, after our
brief sojourn in the furnished house where we had first lived, and
said that there was only one objection to the locality, which was
the prevalence of moths; they obliged you to put away your things in
naphtha-balls almost the moment the spring opened. She wished to know
what books my wife was presently reading, and whether she approved of
women's clubs to the extent that they were carried to in some places.
She believed in book clubs, but to her mind it was very questionable
whether the time that ladies gave to writing papers on so many different
subjects was well spent. She thought it a pity that so many things were
canned, nowadays, and so well canned that the old arts of pickling and
preserving were almost entirely lost. In the conversation, where she
bore a leading part as long as she remained in the room, her mind took
a wide range, and visited more human interests than my wife was at first
able to mention, though afterward she remembered so many that I formed
the notion of something encyclopedic in its compass. When she reached
the letter Z, she rose and took leave of my wife, saying that now she
must go and lie down, as it appeared to be her invariable custom to do
(in behalf of the robust health which she had inherited unimpaired from
a New England ancestry), at exactly half-past four every afternoon.
It was this, she said, more than any one thing that enabled her to go
through so much as she did; but through the door which she left open
behind her my wife heard Talbert's voice saying, in mixed mockery and
tenderness, “Don't forget your tonic, mother,” and hers saying, “No, I
won't, Cyrus. I never forget it, and it's a great pity you don't take
it, too.”
It was our conclusion from all the facts of this call, when we came
to discuss them in the light of some friendly gossip which we had
previously heard, that the eldest daughter of the Talberts came honestly
by her love of ruling if she got it from her grandmother, but that she
was able to indulge it oftener, and yet not so often as might have been
supposed from the mild reticence of her mother. Older if not shrewder
observers than ourselves declared that what went in that house was what
Mrs. Talbert said, and that it went all the more effectively because
what she said Talbert said too.
That might have been because she said so little. When her mother left
the room she let a silence follow in which she seemed too embarrassed
to speak for a while on finding herself alone with my wife, and my wife
decided that the shyness of the girl whose engagement was soon afterward
reported, as well as the easy-goingness of the eldest son, had come from
their mother. As soon as Mrs. Talbert could command herself, she began
to talk, and every word she said was full of sense, with a little gust
of humor in the sense which was perfectly charming. Absolutely unworldly
as she was, she had very good manners; in her evasive way she was
certainly qualified to be the leader of society in Eastridge, and
socially Eastridge thought fairly well of itself. She did not obviously
pretend to so much literature as her mother, but she showed an even
nicer intelligence of our own situation in Eastridge. She spoke with a
quiet appreciation of the improvement in the Banner, which, although she
quoted Mr. Talbert, seemed to be the result of her personal acquaintance
with the paper in the past as well as the present. My wife pronounced
her the ideal mother of a family, and just what the wife of such a
man as Cyrus Talbert ought to be, but no doubt because Mrs. Talbert's
characteristics were not so salient as her mother's, my wife was less
definitely descriptive of her.
From time to time, it seemed that there was a sister of Mr. Talbert's
who visited in the family, but was now away on one of the many other
visits in which she passed her life. She was always going or coming
somewhere, but at the moment she was gone. My wife inferred from the
generation to which her brother belonged that she had long been a lady
of that age when ladies begin to be spoken of as maiden. Mrs. Talbert
spoke of her as if they were better friends than sisters-in-law are apt
to be, and said that she was to be with them soon, and she would
bring her with her when she returned my wife's call. From the general
impression in Eastridge we gathered that Miss Talbert was not without
the disappointment which endears maiden ladies to the imagination, but
the disappointment was of a date so remote that it was only matter of
pathetic hearsay, now. Miss Talbert, in her much going and coming, had
not failed of being several times in Europe. She especially affected
Florence, where she was believed to have studied the Tuscan School to
unusual purpose, though this was not apparent in any work of her own. We
formed the notion that she might be uncomfortably cultured, but when
she came to call with Mrs. Talbert afterward, my wife reported that you
would not have thought, except for a remark she dropped now and then,
that she had ever been out of her central New York village, and so far
from putting on airs of art, she did not speak of any gallery abroad, or
of the pensions in which she stayed in Florence, or the hotels in other
cities of Italy where she had stopped to visit the local schools of
painting.
In this somewhat protracted excursion I have not forgotten that I left
Mr. Talbert leaning against our party fence, with his arms resting on
the top, after a keen if not critical survey of his dwelling. He did not
take up our talk at just the point where we had been in it, but after a
reflective moment, he said, “I don't remember just whether Mrs. Temple
told my mother-in-law you were homoeopaths or allopaths.”
“Well,” I said, “that depends. I rather think we are homoeopaths of
a low-potency type.” My neighbor's face confessed a certain
disappointment. “But we are not bigoted, even in the article of
appreciable doses. Our own family doctor in our old place always advised
us, in stress of absence from him, to get the best doctor wherever
we happened to be, so far as we could make him out, and not mind what
school he was of. I suppose we have been treated by as many allopaths as
homoeopaths, but we're rather a healthy family, and put it all together
we have not been treated a great deal by either.”
Mr. Talbert looked relieved. “Oh, then you will have Dr. Denbigh. He
puts your rule the other way, and gets the best patient he can, no
matter whether he is a homoeopath or an allopath. We have him, in all
our branches; he is the best doctor in Eastridge, and he is the best
man. I want you to know him, and you can't know a doctor the way you
ought to, unless he's your family physician.”
“You're quite right, I think, but that's a matter I should have to leave
two-thirds of to my wife: women are two-thirds of the patients in
every healthy family, and they ought to have the ruling voice about the
doctor.” We had formed the habit already of laughing at any appearance
of joke in each other, and my neighbor now rolled his large head in
mirth, and said:
“That's so, I guess. But I guess there won't be any trouble about Mrs.
Temple's vote when she sees Denbigh. His specialty is the capture of
sensible women. They all swear by him. You met him, didn't you, at my
office, the other day?”
“Oh yes, and I liked him so much that I wished I was sick on the spot!”
“That's good!” my neighbor said, joyfully.
“Well, you could meet the doctor there almost any afternoon of the week,
toward closing-up hours, and almost any evening at our house here, when
he isn't off on duty. It's a generally understood thing that if he isn't
at home, or making a professional visit, he's at one place or the other.
The farmers round stop for him with their buggies, when they're in a
hurry, and half our calls over the 'phone are for Dr. Denbigh. The fact
is he likes to talk, and if there's any sort of man that _I_ like to
talk with better than another, it's a doctor. I never knew one yet that
didn't say something worth while within five minutes' time. Then, you
know that you can be free with them, be yourself, and that's always
worth while, whether you're worth while yourself or not. You can say
just what you think about anybody or anything, and you know it won't
go farther. You may not be a patient, but they've always got their
Hippocratic oath with them, and they're safe. That so?”
My neighbor wished the pleasure of my explicit assent; my tacit assent
he must have read in my smile. “Yes,” I said, “and they're always so
tolerant and compassionate. I don't want to say anything against the
reverend clergy; they're oftener saints upon earth than we allow; but a
doctor is more solid comfort; he seems to understand you exponentially.”
“That's it! You've hit it! He's seen lots of other cases like yours, and
next to a man's feeling that he's a peculiar sufferer, he likes to know
that there are other fellows in the same box.”
We both laughed at this; it was, in fact, a joke we were the joint
authors of.
“Well, we don't often talk about my ailments; I haven't got a great
many; and generally we get on some abstract topic. Just now we're
running the question of female education, perhaps because it's
impersonal, and we can both treat of it without prejudice.”
“The doctor isn't married, I believe?”
“He's a widower of long standing, and that's the best kind of doctor to
have: then he's a kind of a bachelor with practical wisdom added. You
see, I've always had the idea that women, beginning with little girls
and ending with grandmothers, ought to be brought up as nearly like
their brothers as can be--that is, if they are to be the wives of other
women's brothers. It don't so much matter how an old maid is brought up,
but you can't have her destiny in view, though I believe if an old
maid could be brought up more like an old bachelor she would be more
comfortable to herself, anyway.”
“And what does Dr. Denbigh say?”
“Well, you must hear him talk. I guess he rather wants to draw me out,
for the most part.”
“I don't wonder at that. I wish you'd draw yourself out. I've thought
something in the direction of your opinion myself.”
“Have you? That's good! We'll tackle the doctor together sometime. The
difficulty about putting a thing like that in practice is that you have
to co-operate in it with women who have been brought up in the old way.
A man's wife is a woman--”
“Generally,” I assented, as if for argument's sake.
He gave himself time to laugh. “And she has the charge of the children
as long as they're young, and she's a good deal more likely to bring
up the boys like girls than the girls like boys. But the boys take
themselves out of her hands pretty soon, while the girls have to stay
under her thumb till they come out just the kind of women we've always
had.”
“We've managed to worry along with them.”
“Yes, we have. And I don't say but what we fancy them as they are when
we first begin to 'take notice.' One trouble is that children are sick
so much, and their mothers scare you with that, and you haven't the
courage to put your theories into practice. I can't say that any of my
girls have inherited my constitution but this one.” I knew he meant
the one whose engagement was the origin of our conversation. “If you've
heard my mother-in-law talk about her constitution you would think
she belonged to the healthiest family that ever got out of New England
alive, but the fact is there's always something the matter with her, or
she thinks there is, and she's taking medicine for it, anyway. I can't
say but what my wife has always been strong enough, and I've been
satisfied to have the children take after her; but when I saw this one's
sorrel-top as we used to call it before we admired red hair, I knew she
was a Talbert, and I made up my mind to begin my system with her.”
He laughed as with a sense of agreeable discomfiture. “I can't say it
worked very well, or rather that it had a chance. You see, her mother
had to apply it; I was always too busy. And a curious thing was that
though the girl looked like me, she was a good deal more like her mother
in temperament and character.”
“Perhaps,” I ventured, “that's the reason why she was your favorite.”
He dropped his head in rather a shamefaced way, but lifted it with
another laugh. “Well, there may be something in that. Not,” he gravely
retrieved himself, “that we have ever distinguished between our
children.”
“No, neither have we. But one can't help liking the ways of one child
better than another; one will rather take the fancy more than the rest.”
“Well,” my neighbor owned, “I don't know but it's that kind of shyness
in them both. I suppose one likes to think his girl looks like him,
but doesn't mind her being like her mother. I'm glad she's got my
constitution, though. My eldest daughter is more like her grandmother in
looks, and I guess she's got her disposition too, more. I don't know,”
he said, vaguely, “what the last one is going to be like. She seems to
be more worldly. But,” he resumed, strenuously, as if the remembrance of
old opposition remained in his nerves, “when it came to this going off
to school, or college, 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.”