AUNT JANE was eager to hear about the ball, and called everybody into her breakfast-parlor the next morning. She was still hesitating about her bill of fare. “I wish somebody would invent a new animal,” she burst forth. “How those sheep bleated last night! I know it was an expression of shame for providing such tiresome food.”
“You must not be so carnally minded, dear,” said Kate. “You must be very good and grateful, and not care for your breakfast. Somebody says that mutton chops with wit are a great deal better than turtle without.”
“A very foolish somebody,” pronounced Aunt Jane. “I have had a great deal of wit in my life, and very little turtle. Dear child, do not excite me with impossible suggestions. There are dropped eggs, I might have those. They look so beautifully, if it only were not necessary to eat them. Yes, I will certainly have dropped eggs. I think Ruth could drop them; she drops everything else.”
“Poor little Ruth!” said Kate. “Not yet grown up!”
“She will never grow up,” said Aunt Jane, “but she thinks she is a woman; she even thinks she has a lover. O that in early life I had provided myself with a pair of twins from some asylum; then I should have had some one to wait on me.”
“Perhaps they would have been married too,” said Kate.
“They should never have been married,” retorted Aunt Jane. “They should have signed a paper at five years old to do no such thing. Yesterday I told a lady that I was enraged that a servant should presume to have a heart, and the woman took it seriously and began to argue with me. To think of living in a town where one person could be so idiotic! Such a town ought to be extinguished from the universe.”
“Auntie!” said Kate, sternly, “you must grow more charitable.”
“Must I?” said Aunt Jane; “it will not be at all becoming. I have thought about it; often have I weighed it in my mind whether to be monotonously lovely; but I have always thrust it away. It must make life so tedious. It is too late for me to change,—at least, anything about me but my countenance, and that changes the wrong way. Yet I feel so young and fresh; I look in my glass every morning to see if I have not a new face, but it never comes. I am not what is called well-favored. In fact, I am not favored at all. Tell me about the party.”
“What shall I tell?” said Kate.
“Tell me what people were there,” said Aunt Jane, “and how they were dressed; who were the happiest and who the most miserable. I think I would rather hear about the most miserable,—at least, till I have my breakfast.”
“The most miserable person I saw,” said Kate, “was Mrs. Meredith. It was very amusing to hear her and Hope talk at cross-purposes. You know her daughter Helen is in Paris, and the mother seemed very sad about her. A lady was asking if something or other were true; ‘Too true,’ said Mrs. Meredith; ‘with every opportunity she has had no real success. It was not the poor child’s fault. She was properly presented; but as yet she has had no success at all.’
“Hope looked up, full of sympathy. She thought Helen must be some disappointed school-teacher, and felt an interest in her immediately. ‘Will there not be another examination?’ she asked. ‘What an odd phrase,’ said Mrs. Meredith, looking rather disdainfully at Hope. ‘No, I suppose we must give it up, if that is what you mean. The only remaining chance is in the skating. I had particular attention paid to Helen’s skating on that very account. How happy shall I be, if my foresight is rewarded!’
“Hope thought this meant physical education, to be sure, and fancied that handsome Helen Meredith opening a school for calisthenics in Paris! Luckily she did not say anything. Then the other lady said, solemnly, ‘My dear Mrs. Meredith, it is too true. No one can tell how things will turn out in society. How often do we see girls who were not looked at in America, and yet have a great success in Paris; then other girls go out who were here very much admired, and they have no success at all.’
“Hope understood it all then, but she took it very calmly. I was so indignant, I could hardly help speaking. I wanted to say that it was outrageous. The idea of American mothers training their children for exhibition before what everybody calls the most corrupt court in Europe! Then if they can catch the eye of the Emperor or the Empress by their faces or their paces, that is called success!”
“Good Americans when they die go to Paris,” said Philip, “so says the oracle. Naughty Americans try it prematurely, and go while they are alive. Then Paris casts them out, and when they come back, their French disrepute is their stock in trade.”
“I think,” said the cheerful Hope, “that it is not quite so bad.” Hope always thought things not so bad. She went on. “I was very dull not to know what Mrs. Meredith was talking about. Helen Meredith is a warm-hearted, generous girl, and will not go far wrong, though her mother is not as wise as she is well-bred. But Kate forgets that the few hundred people one sees here or at Paris do not represent the nation, after all.”
“The most influential part of it,” said Emilia.
“Are you sure, dear?” said her sister. “I do not think they influence it half so much as a great many people who are too busy to go to either place. I always remember those hundred girls at the Normal School, and that they were not at all like Mrs. Meredith, nor would they care to be like her, any more than she would wish to be like them.”
“They have not had the same advantages,” said Emilia.
“Nor the same disadvantages,” said Hope. “Some of them are not so well bred, and none of them speak French so well, for she speaks exquisitely. But in all that belongs to real training of the mind, they seem to me superior, and that is why I think they will have more influence.”
“None of them are rich, though, I suppose,” said Emilia, “nor of very nice families, or they would not be teachers. So they will not be so prominent in society.”
“But they may yet become very prominent in society,” said Hope,—“they or their pupils or their children. At any rate, it is as certain that the noblest lives will have most influence in the end, as that two and two make four.”
“Is that certain?” said Philip. “Perhaps there are worlds where two and two do not make just that desirable amount.”
“I trust there are,” said Aunt Jane. “Perhaps I was intended to be born in one of them, and that is why my housekeeping accounts never add up.”
Here hope was called away, and Emilia saucily murmured, “Sour grapes!”
“Not a bit of it!” cried Kate, indignantly. “Hope might have anything in society she wishes, if she would only give up some of her own plans, and let me choose her dresses, and her rich uncles pay for them. Count Posen told me, only yesterday, that there was not a girl in Oldport with such an air as hers.”
“Not Kate herself?” said Emilia, slyly.
“I?” said Kate. “What am I? A silly chit of a thing, with about a dozen ideas in my head, nearly every one of which was planted there by Hope. I like the nonsense of the world very well as it is, and without her I should have cared for nothing else. Count Posen asked me the other day, which country produced on the whole the most womanly women, France or America. He is one of the few foreigners who expect a rational answer. So I told him that I knew very little of Frenchwomen personally, but that I had read French novels ever since I was born, and there was not a woman worthy to be compared with Hope in any of them, except Consuelo, and even she told lies.”
“Do not begin upon Hope,” said Aunt Jane. “It is the only subject on which Kate can be tedious. Tell me about the dresses. Were people over-dressed or under-dressed?”
“Under-dressed,” said Phil. “Miss Ingleside had a half-inch strip of muslin over her shoulder.”
Here Philip followed Hope out of the room, and Emilia presently followed him.
“Tell on!” said Aunt Jane. “How did Philip enjoy himself?”
“He is easily amused, you know,” said Kate. “He likes to observe people, and to shoot folly as it flies.”
“It does not fly,” retorted the elder lady. “I wish it did. You can shoot it sitting, at least where Philip is.”
“Auntie,” said Kate, “tell me truly your objection to Philip. I think you did not like his parents. Had he not a good mother?”
“She was good,” said Aunt Jane, reluctantly, “but it was that kind of goodness which is quite offensive.”
“And did you know his father well?”
“Know him!” exclaimed Aunt Jane. “I should think I did. I have sat up all night to hate him.”
“That was very wrong,” said Kate, decisively. “You do not mean that. You only mean that you did not admir............