“Indeed I shan’t, aunt,” he said, earnestly. “I shall eschew them. Indeed I shall eschew them, Aunt Charity.”
“You’d better,” said his aunt, grimly. She was a geometric woman, all angles, corners, tangents and plane surfaces. The one man who might have loved her was Euclid. She had come to Crosby Corners, Connecticut, from Louisburg Square, Boston, to bring up her infant nephew, Edwin Dell, an orphan whose parents had been called away when lightning struck the village church during Wednesday prayer meeting. After Edwin was one year old she always called the gardener in to give Edwin his bath. She had conducted an exclusive school for girls in Boston, and so was able to bring the child up carefully and well. He had not been permitted to go to school; that would have brought him in contact with gauche persons. Any young man would have envied him his ability to read Latin at sight and his considerable knowledge of ecclesiastical history. The malady of the time—ingrown worldliness—had never tainted him. At twenty-one he had conversed with practically no one but his aunt, and the Rev. Vernon Stickney Entwistle, who came to tea on alternate Tuesdays, and Palumbo, the Italian gardener, whose remarks, by Aunt Charity’s strict orders were confined to agricultural subjects, such as “Theesa punk” and “Theesa cab.” It took Edwin some years to discover that Palumbo was saying “This is a pumpkin” and “This is a cabbage.”
Aunt Charity’s library consisted of the following books: The Book of Common Prayer, Young’s Night Thoughts, Fox’s Book of Martyrs, Holy Living and Holy Dying, the Sermons of Bishop Amos Pratt, the Sermons of the Rev. Hosea Ballou (in eleven volumes), the Sermons of John Wesley Tweedy, D.D., the Collected Prayers of the Rev. Nathaniel Beasley, the Sermons (one volume each) of the Revs. Snellgrove, Tetter, Peabody, Kinsolving, Struthers, Kipp, Manning, Pinkney, and Dodd, and The Genealogical History of the Tillotson Family. Aunt Charity was a Boston Tillotson. Young Edwin had free access to this library, and, being by nature bookish, he read all the volumes so assiduously that his aunt had to renew the chintz slip-covers three distinct times.
And now Edwin Dell was going to New York to seek his fortune. It was his first visit to that great city. In its libraries he planned to find material to finish the work on which he was engaged, a scholarly and exhaustive treatise on The History of the Dogma of Infant Damnation in New England between 1800 and 1830. It was to fill six large volumes, possibly ten. It would make something of a stir in the more thoughtful literary circles, he expected, in all modesty. He was a modest young man; he could not tolerate mirrors in his bathroom.
His heart beat fast as he took his seat in the train to New York. There he sat, waiting for the train to start, his ticket and the address of his boarding house clutched in one hand, his lunch box, with the four hard-boiled blanks, clutched in the other. His first week’s allowance was pinned to his union suit by two safety pins.
Passengers, even hardened traveling salesmen, turned to look twice at Edwin Dell; he was so young, so fresh. His light blue eyes were large, round, wondering; they looked at the world so candidly, so trustingly. He had the tall, well-proportioned body of the Tillotsons and the frank, boyish features of the Dells. Not a million mud-baths could have given him those cheeks, to which the color came easily; they were Nature’s reward for clean living, early retiring, and waking with the lark. Electricity had had nothing to do with that wave in his blond hair; that, too, was Nature’s gift. He was quietly dressed in a pepper and salt suit; his necktie was blue with white polka dots.
“Edwin,” his aunt called through the window, “are you sure you packed”—she looked about to be sure no one overheard her—“your woolens?”
“Yes, Aunt Charity.”
“And the goose-grease?”
“Yes, Aunt Charity.”