"Oh, well, I think by this time Aunt Maria understands this, only she wants you to come back and be loving to her, and say you're sorry you can't, etc. After all, Aunt Maria is devoted to us and is miserable when we are out with her."
"Well, I hate to have friends that one must be always bearing with and deferring to."
"Well, Alice, you remember Mr. St. John's sermons on the trials of the first Christians—when he made us all feel that it would have been a blessed chance to go to the stake for our religion?"
"Yes; it was magnificent. I felt a great exaltation."
"Well, I'll tell you what I thought. It may be as heroic, and more difficult, to put down our own temper and make the first concession to an unreasonable old aunt who really loves us than to be martyrs for Christ. Nobody wants us to be martyrs now-a-days; but I think these things that make no show and have no glory are a harder cross to take up."
"Well, Eva, I'll do as you say," said Alice, after a few moments of silence, "for really you speak the truth. I don't know anything harder than to go and make concessions to a person who has acted as ridiculously as Aunt Maria has, and who will take all your concessions and never own a word on her side."
"Well, dear, what I think in these cases is, that I am not perfect. There are always enough things where I didn't do quite right for me to confess; and as to her confessing, that's not my affair. What I have to do is to cut loose from my own sins; they are mine, and hers are hers."
"True," said Alice; "and the fact is, I did speak improperly to Aunt Maria. She is older than I am. I ought not to have said the things I did. I'm hot tempered, and always say more than I mean."
"Well, Ally, do as I did—confess everything you can think of and then say, as I did, that you must still be firm upon one point; and, depend upon it, Aunt Maria will be glad to be friends again."
This conversation had led to an amelioration which caused Aunt Maria to appear at Eva's second reunion in her best point lace and with her most affable company manners, whereby she quite won the heart of simple Mrs. Betsey Benthusen, and was received with patronizing civility by Miss Dorcas. That good lady surveyed Mrs. Wouvermans with an amicable scrutiny as a specimen of a really creditable production of modern New York life. She took occasion to remark to her sister that the Wouvermans were an old family of unquestioned position, and that really Mrs. Wouvermans had acquired quite the family air.