“Wasn’t it dear and sweet and just perfectly lovely of ‘Forty-niner’ to steal away and come to take care of me? Mr. Hale said he was afraid you Sobrante people would be worried about him, so he telegraphed right back to tell you where he was. I hope you got that message sooner than we used to those which came by way of Marion; but, of course, you did—since now we have a little station of our very own right at ‘the Sobrante.’ Queer. My Cousin Margaret and some people who have come to this house seem to think it’s a wonderful thing, that having a copper mine in the family. I don’t! I think it’s horrid. If it hadn’t been for that old stuff being dug out of the earth I’d never have had to come away here to be educated. Am I not getting educated fast? Yet I’ve learned to write thus much better just from you and Mr. Ninian teaching me at home. I am taking the greatest pains to do all you want me to.
“This is the queerest, quaintest old house in the city, some of the visitors say. That our Cousin Margaret has been offered an enormous price for it but won’t sell it, even though she would get all that money and ‘the neighborhood isn’t what it used to be.’ Even she says that, and complains most bitterly about the ‘parvenusers’ that have crept into it. There are stores and artists’ studios and apartment places and—all sorts of things that a Waldron doesn’t like in the Square, nowadays. But Cousin Margaret says that once only the ‘inner circle of society’ dwelt in these old houses.
“Speaking of old: that is one word you must never apply to our Cousin Margaret. I thought I’d best tell you in case you didn’t know. I shouldn’t have known, not right at first, if Barnes hadn’t told me. Barnes says that the older and more worn-out the things are the better pleased Mrs. Dalrymple is. She is so proud of everything in the ‘mansion’ being just the same as it was in her own grandfather’s time, that she won’t even buy new chairs for the kitchen nor have new plumbing put in, even though the health officers have been trying to make her do that. That’s why she can never keep cooks and people like that, of the ‘lower classes,’ you know. Barnes says there have been four new cooks this very last week that ever was, and I guess each one is stupider than the other. I know Wun Lung would have been ashamed to put such stuff on our table at home as we had here that first luncheon. (We spell lunch with an ‘eon’ at our Cousin Margaret’s.) As for dear Aunt Sally, I believe she would have got up and tossed the whole mess out into the garden for the chickens to eat. Only there aren’t any chickens and Aunt Sally wasn’t here.
“Dear Ephraim was; and that is the best thing has happened this dozen years, Tipkins says. You used to know Tipkins, so, of course, you know too that he ‘wouldn’t demean himself to cook anything’ unless his Madam was really starving, and then he’d make Barnes do it. He is the only one can make Barnes do things she doesn’t like. My Cousin Margaret can’t. It’s Barnes makes Cousin Margaret. But Barnes said she was a lady’s-maid and she wouldn’t demean, either. Ephraim thinks there’s a ‘touch of sentiment in Barnes’s heart for Tipkins’ and that’s why she minds him—sometimes! Ephraim wishes she would get the same sort of ‘touch’ for him, then she wouldn’t order him to do things he really doesn’t like. Mr. Hale thought Cousin Margaret would be angry with ‘Forty-niner’ for coming and send him away, but she wasn’t at all. She thinks it is perfectly ‘correct and Waldron-y’ to have a man belonging to you. She was a little vexed that you didn’t send a ‘maid’ with me, too, till I told her you hadn’t any maid to send. Our maids were both Chinese ‘boys’ and had never combed a girl’s hair in their lives nor buttoned a frock.
“But the best part about Ephraim is that now he is the cook. Seems that when he was offered that first luncheon he looked it over and turned up his nose about it. Said he reckoned he was in a city where they could buy victuals ready cooked if a body was such a fool he couldn’t cook them himself. And would he go out and get something fit to eat? And Tipkins asked, had he any money? Then Ephraim had to own that he hadn’t. It had taken his very last cent to pay his own fare here from home and to pay Buster’s fare, too. Think of that? The darling old ‘boy’ had hired Buster brought on by express, in a car all by himself, because there weren’t any cattle cars on our train, and it had cost—Oh! dear! I don’t yet know how much. Ephy won’t tell. Anyway, he’d struck his bottom dollar when he reached Washington Square—had just enough to hire the hackman to bring Buster to the house for him. So he’s here, in the stable behind, with our Cousin Margaret’s black span, who are as old, seems if, as everything else.
“Asking him if he had money for the food made Ephraim mad. So he said that if he hadn’t he had sense enough to cook it, if there was any to cook. Then Tipkins hurried off and bought a great basket full of everything nice, and that night we had such a dinner as would have done even Aunt Sally credit. There was quite a tilt between those two funny old men! Tipkins, he said he was the butler, and as long as there was a woman under the roof it wasn’t a man’s place to handle a gridiron, and so he wouldn’t demean to cook. Ephraim said he’d been everything under the sun a man could be—except a nasty, high-flown English butler! He’d worn the United States’ military uniform, and he’d dug gold out of California mountains, and taught the nicest girl in the universe to sharpshoot to beat the militia—That was me! Wasn’t it nice of him to say that?—and he guessed rather than let that girl what had done him so proud go and starve for want of decent food he’d tackle the first frying-pan came his way.
“So there he is, installed in the great, dreary kitchen downstairs, where it’s so dark I wonder he can see at all, and just as proud now of the fine things he fixes as he used to be of me when I hit the bull’s-eye. And our Cousin Margaret is perfectly delighted with him. She isn’t a bit ashamed to say that her stomach has a good deal to do with her temper, and that if the first is satisfied the last is sure to be. That’s a good thing about Cousin Margaret. She isn’t a bit afraid to say anything she thinks about—about all that is, except her own age. I don’t mean, course, that she would tell a wrong story about that, even, if anybody would dare to ask, but I can’t fancy anybody daring. She is such a beautiful old lady—gentlewoman, I should say. She’s like you in that, she thinks that is the correctest word. She wears clothes that even I, who don’t know much about such matters, know are perfectly beautiful. Shining, shimmery silks—like the sunlight on the arroyo when there’s water in it; made long and draggy like our peacocks’ own tails and her hair—Why, mother dearest! Even your beautiful hair isn’t half so much as hers. It’s piled on top of her head in what she calls a ‘pompydoor,’ and dips down behind all in little crinkles, like mine after it’s been washed; and her skin is so white, I don’t believe she ever went out into the sunshine without her veil to keep it off. Her eyes are black and snappy and she never wears glasses, like the ‘boys’ do, except in what Barnes calls the ‘privacy of her bedchamber.’ I’ve never seen that privacy and I should be afraid to sleep in her bedchamber. It’s the front room upstairs, with three great windows and an ‘alcove.’ In the ‘alcove’ is a big, big bed, all stuffy curtains and things around it and so high there’s a little ladder to climb up. There are looking-glasses all about and so many chairs and wardrobes and things I shouldn’t think she could hardly move about. I have seen it all from the hall, going to my own room at the back, but I’ve never been invited in and I wouldn’t dare to go without being asked. That’s the one thing about our Cousin Margaret. I guess it’s what you call ‘stately.’ She keeps people from daring, all except Barnes. Even the persons who call and stay in the drawing-room act afraid of Madam. Her reception days are like a queen’s, Tipkins says. There is to be one, to-morrow; the ‘last of the season.’ She sent Barnes down somewhere to buy me a white frock, with blue ribbons and white shoes and stockings. I am to wear it at the reception and be presented, for a few minutes, because I am ‘Gabriella’s child.’ Then I am to be sent away again. That seems silly to me: to spend money for a frock to wear only a few minutes, but I wouldn’t dare say so to Madame Dalrymple.
“My room is the one you used to have. I wonder how you could sleep in it without being afraid. I can’t. So Ephy comes upstairs and sleeps on a cot outside the door. I was never afraid in all my life before, but I am here. Everything is so big and dark and heavy. I feel as if I were carrying mountains on my chest, and I’d give—Oh! what wouldn’t I give to jump on Buster’s bare back and scamper up the canyon as fast as he could go! Cousin Margaret was nice about Buster, too. She says it is quite a distinction to have a real Californian with her caballero and broncho to ride alongside her carriage when she goes out driving in the Park. We are going this afternoon. But I don’t feel as glad as I ought, because I must wear the funniest kind of a habit, with a long flapping skirt, and Ephraim must put on some stiff-looking things she calls suitable for a groom. Cousin Margaret has bought these clothes for us, too, all ready-made, and Ephraim says he is plumb disgusted, and that he will feel like a fool. I hope he won’t. I can’t imagine darling ‘Forty-niner’ feeling like anybody except his own sensible self.
“Now, dearest mother, I must stop. I promised Cousin Margaret I would have my new riding things on at precisely four o’clock. When she says four o’clock she doesn’t mean a minute before that time nor a minute after. The first lesson she is trying to teach me is—is ‘punctuerality’ or something like that. She says that to be exact is another mark of a gentlewoman, and dear me! It seems that being a gentlewoman here in New York, with Madam to watch me, is lots harder than being one at dear Sobrante, with only your sweet smile to guide me.
“P.S. I have written you a long, long letter. I have felt as if I were talking to you and I have talked right out. The reason it is done so well is that Cousin Margaret has read it all over and corrected it and made me copy it. She said she would have liked to strike out some of my sentences; that they ‘suggested a coarseness which must have come from the Trent side of my nature,’ and that no girl, purely Waldron, would have put them in. However, it was her own dignity as a Waldron which kept her from the striking out. She was willing to correct the spelling and writing, though she left some mistakes for you to see, so that you might know how much I need that education I have got to take. Oh! dear! It sounds like a dose of castor oil, or Aunt Sally’s picra! Or even like a great big club I must be cudgelled with. Never mind. I’ll ‘tackle’ that old education with everything that is in me, so that I can get it over and done with and travel home to you again. The last part of this letter I have not had to have corrected; and the next one I write I’ll try to make so perfect she’ll not wish to read any more. If our Cousin Margaret would only love me a little tiny bit! or let me love her. I so long to hear somebody say ‘darling’ or ‘precious,’ or anything else that would make me know they cared. Only Ephraim does now and then, but has to say it on ‘the sly’ as he calls it. When Cousin Margaret doesn’t hear. It would be beneath a Waldron’s dignity to be familiar with a servant—and she considers darling ‘Forty-niner’ such. He only laughs about it; though, all the same, I believe he’s met what Marty calls his ‘come-uppance’ in our Cousin Margaret. She likes him, treats him well enough, but keeps him at arms’ length as if he were some sort of a ‘creature’ and he is more afraid of her than even Tipkins. He says that’s because if he offended she would send him away and he won’t be sent.