Algy Biggs was a near if collateral kinsman of a very real and great poet on the other side of the English-speaking world, a thing he never was allowed to forget, and which in company rendered him next to mute. Yet he was amazingly big and athletic and good-looking, great in the local militia, in the summer regattas on the river, as a stroke oar on the barge picnic parties, carrying the baskets and luggage, building the fires, fetching water.
"A regular Herculaneum, or whoever it was performed labors and cleaned stables," Amanthus had said of him.
"He won't come if he knows what we want him for," affirmed Selina, decidedly. "I'll try."
Adele here pointed out the flaw in the arrangements, it being her gift from Heaven always to do that.
"But the ones you're naming are nearer our ages. There ought to be somebody more suitable for Miss Boswell."
"Your Cousin Marcus, Selina." said Maud.
Selina felt ashamed of the haste with which she said no for surely it is an unworthy thing to be overly sensitive about your kin, and nobody is any better off as to family than the total average in desirability of its members. Still there was no use running the family in on Miss Boswell if she did not have to.
Aunt Juanita, married to Uncle Bruce, was Mamma's sister, and Cousin Marcus was their son. Aunt Juanita wrote letters to the newspapers on every sort of subject that engrossed her from Schopenhauer to Susan B. Anthony, and made impassioned addresses to women wherever she ran into them, at parties, picnics, church societies, anywhere, like as not having forgotten to take down one curl-paper in dressing her iron-gray hair. The subjects for the addresses varied.
A forerunner, a feminine John Baptist to her day and place and sex, as Selina was one day to come to see her, then Aunt Juanita Bruce, tall, angular, unmended and ungroomed, stood alone in her community, unique in type but none the less absorbed and none the more abashed for that.