Not once did Tom say: “Mary, we do this [or that] in our family.” He was too happy, and I suppose he never thought of it. As for me, I wasted no worry on his family. They would be kind and sympathetic and simple, like Tom. They would love me and I would love them.
The day after we returned from Canada to New York I spent looking over Tom's “personal belongings”—as great a revelation as Aunt Martha's. His richly bound books, his beautiful furniture, his pictures—everything was perfect. That night Tom made an announcement: “The family gets home to-night, and they will come to call to-morrow.”
“Why don't we go to the station to meet them?” I suggested.
To-day I appreciate better than I could then the gentle tact with which Tom told me his family was strong on “good form”, and that the husband's family calls on the bride first. My husband's family came, and I realized that I was a mere baby in a new world—a complicated and not very friendly world, at that. Though they never put it into words, they made me understand, in their cruel, polite way, that Tom was the hope of the family, and his sudden marriage to a stranger had been a great shock, if not more.
The beautiful ease of my husband's women-folk filled me with admiration and despair. I felt guilty of something. I was queer. Their voices, the intonation, even the tilt of their chins, seemed to stamp these new “in-laws” as aristocrats of another race. Yet the same old New England stock that sired their ancestors produced my father's fathers.
Theirs had stayed in Boston, and had had time to teach their children grace and refinement and subtleties. Mine fought for their existence in a new country. And when men and women fight for existence life becomes very simple.
I felt only my own misery that day. Now I realize that the meeting between Tom's mother and his wife was a mutual misery. I was crude. No doubt, to her, I seemed even common. With every one except Tom I seemed awkward and stupid. Poor mother-in-law!
When she rose to go, I saw her to her carriage. She was extremely insistent that I should not. But this was Tom's mother, and I was determined to leave no friendly act undone. At home it would have been an offense not to see the company to their wagon. Even in Madison we would have escorted a caller to his carriage.
Again it was the coachman who with one chill look warned me that I had sinned.
Before Tom came home that afternoon he called on his mother, so no explanations from me were necessary. He knew it all, and doubtless much more than had escaped me. Like the princely gentleman he always was, the poor boy tried to soften that after-noon's blows by saying social customs were stupid and artificial and I knew all the important things in life. The other few little things and habits of his world he could easily tell me.