Excavating a Husband

BY Ella Bell Wallis
THE McLEAN COMPANY Publishers BALTIMORE, MD.
Copyright 1916 Ella Bell Wallis

EXCAVATING A HUSBAND
Katherine Boulby had reached her fiftieth year, and all these years had been spent in single blessedness. It is true that she had not realized the entirety of the perfect calm and peace that abides in the maiden state, for her brother Joseph and she lived together. But Miss Katherine—as she was commonly called in her native town—was of a cheerful disposition and said that she felt she was indeed blessed among women, as she had graciously been endowed with sense enough to choose a free and unfettered life, and the vexations and limitations contingent upon the proximity of one of the male sex, had been mitigated as much as possible for her as her brother was a quiet, fairly pliant man who rarely interfered with her plans for broadening and enriching her mind.
This mental culture was Miss Katherine’s chief aim in life, and it was not a selfish one. She never refused to give abundantly of her knowledge, and ever strove to correct and purify the literary and artistic tastes of her friends. It would be quite impossible to state upon what lines Miss Katherine pursued her mental cultivation, for, like the great geniuses, she was extremely versatile, and in almost every subject she described an avenue which, if followed to the end would lead at last to the goal whither she was bound. As Miss Katherine strayed from one path to another in the great labyrinth of learning, it is very probable that she was inextricably lost and didn’t know it. But she found pleasure and sustenance therein, and never sought to find herself.
Now, it is far from my purpose to represent my heroine as a blue-stocking or as other than a most charming person. Had she pursued her studies methodically and scientifically she might not have been the same delightful woman that she was, but she flitted from romantic prose to didactic poetry and from poetry to astrology, and thence to architecture, history or biology. In Miss Katherine you found a person who possessed a rare instinct concerning hobbies. She never became so abstruse as to be unintelligible to her friends who were not hobbyists. She dealt in interesting and easy generalities.