OPINIONS AND THEORIES
Mr. and Mrs. Rufus Gray were the last to leave the city, after the house-party. They returned to their brother Robert's home for a day, when the other guests had gone, and it was on the evening before their departure that they related their experiences while at the house of Matthew Kendrick. With most of the members of the Gray household, they were sitting before the fire in the living-room when Aunt Ruth suddenly spoke her mind.
"I don't know when I've felt so sorry for the too rich as I felt in that house," said she. She was knitting a gray silk mitten, and her needles were flying.
"Why, Aunt Ruth?" inquired her nephew Louis, who sat next her, revelling in the comfort of home after a particularly harassing day at the office. "Did they seem to lack anything in particular?"
"I should say they did," she replied. "Nothing that money can buy, of course, but about everything that it can't."
"For instance?" he pursued, turning affectionate eyes upon his aunt's small figure in its gray gown, as the firelight played upon it, touching her abundant silvering locks and making her eyes seem to sparkle almost as brilliantly as her swiftly moving needles.
Aunt Ruth put down her knitting for an instant, looking at her nephew. "Why, you know," said she. "You're sitting in the very middle of it this minute!"
Louis looked about him, smiling. He was, indeed, in the midst of an accustomed scene of both home-likeness and beauty. The living-room was of such generous proportions that even when the entire family were gathered there they could not crowd it. On a wide couch, at one side of the fireplace, sat his father and mother, talking in low tones concerning some matter of evident interest, to judge by their intent faces. Rosamond, like the girl she resembled, sat, girl fashion, on a pile of cushions close by the fire; and Stephen, her husband, not far away, by a table with a drop-light, was absorbed in a book. Uncle Rufus was examining a pile of photographs on the other side of the table. Ted sprawled on a couch at the far end of the room, deep in a boy's magazine, a reading light at his elbow. At the opposite end of the room, where the piano stood, Roberta, music rack before her, was drawing her bow across nearly noiseless strings, while Ruth picked softly at her harp: indications of intention to burst forth into musical strains when a hush should chance to fall upon the company.
Judge Calvin Gray alone was absent from the gathering, and even as
Louis's eyes wandered about the pleasant room, his uncle's figure
appeared in the doorway. As if he were answering his sister Ruth, Judge
Gray spoke his thought.
"I wonder," said he, advancing toward the fireside, "if anywhere in this wide world there is a happier family life than this!"