The Professional Aunt

by Mary C. E. Wemyss

"What has Claud been doing?" I asked. "Oh, nothing he can help, I feel sure. He has a temperament, I believe. What it is I don't quite know; people grow out of it, I am told. It's not so much doing things as saying them; and his friends are odd, decidedly odd. They wear curious ties, have disheveled hair, and are distinctly décolleté. I don't know if I should apply the word to men, but they are."

I suggested that these little indiscretions on the part of extreme youth need not worry her. But she said they did, in a way, because her other children were so very plain sailing. They never took any one by surprise. She then told me of poor Lady Adelaide, a near neighbor, at least as near as it was possible for any neighbor to be, considering the extent of the Manwell property, one of whose boys had written a book without her knowledge, and the other had married under exactly similar conditions.

I said I thought the writing of a book a minor offense compared to the matrimonial venture. She agreed, but said they were both upsetting because unexpected. As an instance, did I remember when Lady Victoria was butted by her pet lamb, when she was showing the Prince her white farm? It wasn't the upsetting she minded, so much as the unexpectedness of it, because the lamb had a blue ribbon round its neck!

"A black sheep in a white farm, Aunt Anna!" I said.

"No, dear, it was white, and it was a lamb."

But to return to Lady Adelaide. Now that Aunt Anna came to think of it, the marriage was the better of the two shocks, because financially it was a success, and the book wasn't. "Books aren't," She added.

"Is that all Claud does, or, rather, his friends do?" I asked.

"No, it's not," she said. "Ever since he went to Oxford he has changed completely. He has got into his head that we are a self-centered family, and that I am a prejudiced mother, when it is the only thing I am not. I may be everything else for all I know, I may be daily breaking all the commandments without knowing it! But a prejudiced mother I am not! Before he went to Oxford he came into my bedroom one morning, and he said that he thought Maud and Edith were quite the most beautiful girls he had ever seen, and he had sat behind some famous beauty in a theatre a few nights before. I didn't ask him! I was suffering from neuralgia at the time, I remember, and he might, under the circumstances, have agreed just to soothe me, but he said it of his own accord, and he wondered if they would go up to London and walk down Bond Street with him. I said it should be arranged. They walked with him three times up and down Bond Street; he only asked for once. I am only telling you this because you will then realize what this change in him means to me. He came back from Oxford after one term and he said nothing about the girls' beauty, although I thought them improved. I didn't say so; I made some little joke about Bond Street, which he pretended not to understand. So I just said I thought the girls improved, or rather were looking very pretty, and he said, 'My dear mother, we must learn to look at these things from the point of view of the outsider. Place yourself in the position of a man of the world seeing them for the first time.'"

To begin with, Aunt Anna proceeded to explain, she could never place herself in a position to which she was not born; she did not think it right. She said that Claud then urged her to look at it from stranger's point of view, since that of man of the world was impracticable, which Aunt Anna said was a thing no mother could do, nor would she wish to do it. She left such things to actresses. Talking of actresses reminded her that Claud had even found fault with Maud as an actress, when every one knew how very excellent she was. Several newspapers, the Southshire Herald in particular, had alluded to her as one of our most talented actresses.

"We had a professional down to coach her, and he said there was really nothing he could teach her. He was a very nice man, and had all his meals with us. I went," continued Aunt Anna, "to see the great French actress who was in London in the spring, you remember? And if ever a mother went with an unprejudiced mind, I was that mother. I was prepared to think she was better than Maud, and if she had been, I should have been the first to say it. But she was not, at least not to my mind! Maud is always a lady, even on the stage, and that woman was not."