So, dear Mother, my mission work is coming to me. I need not go out for it. I shall write more of this in a day or two.
Ever yours,
Eva.
[CHAPTER XXV.]
AUNT MARIA ENDEAVORS TO SET MATTERS RIGHT.
Mrs. Maria Wouvermans was one of those forces in creation to whom quiet is impossible. Watchfulness, enterprise and motion were the laws of her existence, as incessantly operating as any other laws of nature.
When we last saw her, she was in high ill-humor with her sister, Mrs. Van Arsdel, with Alice and Eva, and the whole family. She revenged herself upon them, as such good creatures know how to do, by heaping coals of fire on their heads in the form of ostentatiously untiring and uncalled-for labors for them all. The places she explored to get their laces mended and their quillings done up and their dresses made, the pilgrimages she performed in omnibuses, the staircases she climbed, the men and women whom she browbeat and circumvented in bargains—all to the advantage of the Van Arsdel purse—were they not recounted and told over in a way to appall the conscience of poor, easy Mrs. Van Arsdel, whom they summarily convicted of being an inefficient little know-nothing, and of her girls, who thus stood arraigned for the blackest ingratitude in not appreciating Aunt Maria?
"I'll tell you what it is, Alice," said Eva, when Aunt Maria's labors had come to the usual climax of such smart people, and laid her up with a sick-headache, "we girls have just got to make up with Aunt Maria, or she'll tear down all New York. I always notice that when she's out with us she goes tearing about in this way, using herself up for us—doing things no mortal wants her to do, and yet that it seems black ingratitude not to thank her for. Now, Alice, you are the one, this time, and you must just go and sit with her and make up, as I did."
"But, Eva, I know the trouble you fell into, letting her and mother entangle you with Wat Sydney, and I'm not going to have it happen again. I will not be compromised in any way or shape with a man whom I never mean to marry."