But Aunt Maria, like many dreaded future evils, proved less formidable on this occasion than had been feared.
The very submissive and edifying manner in which Mr. Jim Fellows had received her strictures and cautions on a former occasion, and the profound respect he had shown for her opinion, had so far wrought upon her as to make her feel that it was really a pity that he was not a young man of established fortune. If he only had anything to live on, why, he might be a very desirable match; and so, when he had a good position and salary, he stood some inches higher in her esteem. Besides this, there was another balm which distilled resignation in the cup of acquiescence, and that was the grand chance it gave her to say, "I told you so." How dear and precious this privilege is to the very best of people, we need not insist. There are times when it would comfort them, if all their dearest friends were destroyed, to be able to say, "I told you so. It's just as I always predicted!" We all know how Jonah, though not a pirate or a cut-throat, yet wished himself dead because a great city was not destroyed, when he had taken the trouble to say it would be. Now, though Alice's engagement was not in any strict sense an evil, yet it was an event which Aunt Maria had always foreseen, foretold and insisted on.
So when, with heart-sinkings and infinite precautions, Mrs. Van Arsdel had communicated the news to her, she was rather relieved at the response given, with a toss of the head and a vigorous sniff:
"Oh, that's no news to me; it's just what I have foreseen all along—what I told you was coming on, and you wouldn't believe it. Now I hope all of you will see that I was right."
"I think," said Mrs. Van Arsdel, "that it was Jim's presence of mind in saving her life that decided Alice at last. She always liked him; but I don't think she really loved him till then."
"Well, of course, it was a good thing that there was somebody at hand who had sense to do the right thing, when girls will be so careless; but it wasn't that. She meant to have him all along; and I knew it," said Aunt Maria. "Well, Jim Fellows, after all, isn't the worst match a girl could make, either, now that he has some prospects of his own—but, at any rate, it has turned out just as I said it would. I knew she'd marry him, six months ago, just as well as I know it now, unless you and she listened to my advice then. So now all we have to do is to make the best of it. You've got two weddings on your hands, now Nellie, instead of one, and I shall do all I can to help you. I was out all day yesterday looking at sheeting, and I think that at Shanks & Maynard's is decidedly the firmest and the cheapest, and I ordered three pieces sent home; and I carried back the napkins to Taggart's, and then went rambling off up by the Park to find that woman that does marking."
"I'm sure, Maria, I am ever so much obliged to you," said Mrs. Van Arsdel.
"Well, I hope I'm good for something. Though I'm not fit to be out; I've such a dreadful cold in my head, I can hardly see; and riding in these New York omnibuses always makes it worse."
"Dear Maria, why will you expose yourself in that way?"
"Well, somebody's got to do it—and your judgment isn't worth a fip, Nellie. That sheeting that you were thinking of taking wasn't half so good, and cost six cents a yard more. I couldn't think of having things go that way."