"Are you going to market, Aunt Matoaca?" she asked, "and will you remember to buy seed for my canary?"
The flush in Miss Matoaca's cheek this time, I could not explain.
"Sister Mitty will go," she replied, in confusion, "I—I have another engagement."
"She alludes to a meeting of one of her boards," observed Miss Mitty, and turning to me she added, with what I felt to be an unfair thrust at the shrinking bosom of Miss Matoaca, "My sister is a great reader, Mr. Starr, and she has drawn many of her opinions out of books instead of from life."
I looked up, my eyes met Miss Matoaca's, and I remembered her love story.
"We all do that, I suppose," I answered. "Even when we get them from life, haven't most of them had their beginning in books?"
"I am not a great reader myself," remarked Miss Mitty, a trifle primly. "My father used to say that when a lady had read a chapter of her Bible in the morning, and consulted her cook-book, she had done as much literary work as was good for her. Too intimate an acquaintance with books, he always said, was apt to unsettle the views, and the best judgment a woman can have, I am sure, is the opinion of the gentlemen of her family."
"That may be true," I admitted, and my self-possession returned to me, until a certain masculine assurance sounded in my voice, "but I'm quite sure I shouldn't like anybody else's opinion to decide mine."
"You are a man," rejoined Miss Mitty, and I felt that she had not been able to bring her truthful lips to utter the word "gentleman." "It is natural that you should have independent ideas, but, as far as I am concerned, I am perfectly content to think as my grandmother and my great-grandmother have thought before me. Indeed, it seems to me almost disrespectful to differ from them."
"And it was dear great-grandmama," laughed Sally, "who when the doctor once enquired if her tooth ached, turned to great-grandpapa and asked, 'Does it ache, Bolivar?'"