The Professional Aunt

by Mary C. E. Wemyss

"Because I am not the woman. Go to bed, Pauline."

She went—to sleep? I cannot say. I forget whether a girl goes to sleep the first night after she has fallen in love. Night? I suppose I should say morning. But it depends on the hour when she takes the first step into that bewildering fairyland of first love. For a fairyland it assuredly is, if she is lucky enough to find the right guide. He must, to begin with, believe in the fairyland. He must know that the path may be rough at times, stony and overgrown with weeds, but he will know that all the difficulties will be worth while when he brings her out into the open, and they look away to the limitless horizon of happiness.

A few hours later, Pauline said to me at breakfast, "Betty, I think I shall tell that bootmaker to make me two pairs of boots and two pairs of shoes. It is better to have enough while one is about it, don't you think so?"

So began the regeneration of Pauline, regeneration in the matter of footgear, I mean, and to wear good boots did her character no harm, nor the pocket of the country shoemaker either, I am sure. Good boots could not turn her feet from the pathway of truth and goodness which from her earliest childhood she had set out to tread, never pausing except to pick up some one who lagged behind, or to help some one who had strayed from the path.

Dick Dudley, whose pathway through life had zigzagged considerably, was astonished to find how easy the pathway was to keep, guided by Pauline, and how alluring the goal of goodness. He gave himself up gladly to her guidance, and was touched to find how much there was of latent goodness in him. He had never before realized, that was all, how much he loved his fellow-creatures, how he longed to help them all, how the conditions of the laboring-classes made his blood boil with indignation, how he idolized babies, loved old women, reverenced old men.

It was all a revelation to him. It was, moreover, delightful to be told by Pauline how wonderful she found all these things in him, and how unexpected. This, she explained, was nothing personal. "But I often wondered if I should ever meet a man like you."

"Darling," he answered humbly, "I don't think I am that sort of man; really, I'm awfully and frightfully ordinary."

Then Pauline, to prove the contrary, would ask him if he didn't feel this or that or the other? And of course he could truthfully say he did, because he felt all and everything Pauline wished him to feel, with her beautiful eyes fixed upon him and the flush of enthusiasm on her cheeks. Here was something to inspire a man, this splendidly generous, magnanimous creature. Of course he had always felt all these things; he had been groping after goodness. It was the goodness in Diana, and he was kind enough to say in the professional aunt, which had appealed to him. He had been feeling after, it for years, but it was only Pauline who had revealed it to him, in himself. Well, he was very much in love. Most men engaged to charming girls feel their own unworthiness, and the girl is sweetly content that they should do so. Not so Pauline. She revealed to her astonished lover a depth of goodness in his character that he had least suspected, and he gradually began to feel how little he had been understood.

Now this is an excellent basis on which to start an engagement. I forget exactly how and when they became engaged, but it was certainly before Dick said humbly, "Darling, I don't think I am that sort of man; really, I'm awfully and frightfully ordinary," because, with all Pauline's kindness to sinners, there was none hardened enough to address her as "darling" without being first engaged to her; so by that I know they were engaged that evening at the opera, because it was in a Wagnerian pause that Dick said those words, in a loud voice from the back of the box. How else should a professional aunt know these things?

Between meeting Dick and becoming engaged to him, Pauline went home and came back with a larger box and stayed quite a long time, as time goes, although, as a time in which to become engaged, it was very short, and Nannie, feeling this, asked Pauline if she knew much about Mr. Dudley, and was she wise? In spite of this anxiety on Nannie's part, she enjoyed it all immensely, and wept to her heart's content when the engagement was announced. Now Dick Dudley was a rich young man, and I wondered whether other people wept too from motives less pure and simple than Nannie's.