My Dear Maggie (Flora had written): Well, mercy me, you have given us a surprise this time, and no mistake! Yet we’re all real glad, Maggie, and we hope you’ll be awfully happy. You deserve it, all right. Poor Maggie! You’ve had such an awfully hard time all your life!
Well, when your letter came, we were just going out to Jim’s for an old-fashioned Thanksgiving dinner, so I took it along with me and read it to them all. I kept it till we were all together, too, though I most bursted with the news all the way out.
Well, you ought to have heard their tongues wag! They were all struck dumb first, for a minute, all except Mellicent. She spoke up the very first thing, and clapped her hands.
“There,” she cried. “What did I tell you? I knew Aunt Maggie was good enough for anybody!”
To explain that I’ll have to go back a little. We were talking one day about you—Jane and Mellicent and me—and we said you were a saint, only not a marrying saint. But Mellicent thought you were, and it seems she was right. Oh, of course, we’d all thought once Mr. Smith might take a fancy to you, but we never dreamed of such a thing as this—Mr. Stanley G. Fulton! Sakes alive—I can hardly sense it yet!
Jane, for a minute, forgot how rich he was, and spoke right up real quick—“It’s for her money, of course. I knew some one would marry her for that fifty thousand dollars!” But she laughed then, right off, with the rest of us, at the idea of a man worth twenty millions marrying anybody for fifty thousand dollars.
Benny says there ain’t any man alive good enough for his Aunt Maggie, so if Mr. Fulton gets to being too high-headed sometimes, you can tell him what Benny says.
But we’re all real pleased, honestly, Maggie, and of course we’re terribly excited. We’re so sorry you’re going to be married out there in Chicago. Why can’t you make him come to Hillerton? Jane says she’d be glad to make a real nice wedding for you—and when Jane says a thing like that, you can know how much she’s really saying, for Jane’s feeling awfully poor these days, since they lost all that money, you know.
And we’d all like to see Mr. Fulton, too—“Cousin Stanley,” as Hattie always calls him. Please give him our congratulations—but there, that sounds funny, doesn’t it? (But the etiquette editors in the magazines say we must always give best wishes to the bride and congratulations to the groom.) Only it seems funny here, to congratulate that rich Mr. Fulton on marrying you. Oh, dear! I didn’t mean it that way, Maggie. I declare, if that sentence wasn’t ’way in the middle of this third page, and so awfully hard for me to write, anyway, I’d tear up this sheet and begin another. But, after all, you’ll understand, I’m sure. You know we all think the world of you, Maggie, and that I didn’t mean anything against you. It’s just that—that Mr. Fulton is—is such a big man, and all—But you know what I meant.
Well, anyway, if you can’t come here to be married, we hope you’ll bring him here soon so we can see him, and see you, too. We miss you awfully, Maggie,—truly we do, especially since Jim’s folks went, and with Mr. Smith gone, too, Jane and I are real lonesome.