"Harry, what nonsense you do talk!" said his aunt. "Before these girls—!"
"I imagine these girls know Harry by this time," remarked Aunt Selina. "If they don't, it's time they did. You're a hundred times more innocent than they, Cecilia, and always will be."
"Exactly always what I tell Mama," put in Ruth, the eldest of Aunt Cecilia's brood. "Besides, what Harry said is all quite true, I'm sure. Except about me; I shan't marry a foreigner at all, but if I do, I certainly shan't marry a brewer. Mama is far too rich for me to take anything less than a duke."
This was literally, almost painfully true. A succession of deaths in Aunt Cecilia's family, accompanied by a scarcity of male heirs, had placed her in possession of almost untold wealth—"more than I bargained for when I took you," as Uncle James jocularly put it, for the pleasure of seeing her bridle and blush. Aunt C. was one of the richest women in the country, but it never changed her a particle. Not all her wealth, not all her social prominence, not all the refining influences that several generations' enjoyment of these brings, could ever make her even appear to be anything but the simple, warm-hearted, motherly creature she was.
Harry, realizing all this as well as any one, exerted himself to make Aunt C. glad she had made the effort to come to see him graduate, and he manfully escorted her and the girls to the play, the baccalaureate service, his class-day exercises, the baseball game and various other entertainments, where, as Ruth rather aptly put it, "we can sit around and watch somebody else do something." He also did his full duty by his cousin, and danced away a long and perspiring evening with her at the senior promenade. He found Ruth very good company, in spite of her active tongue, or rather, perhaps, because of it.
The final Wednesday, pregnant with fate, arrived at length, and after an immense deal of watching other people receive degrees, some earned and some accorded by the pure generosity of the University, Harry became entitled to write the magic initials "B.A." after his name. Being one of the leaders of his class in point of scholarship, he was one of the twenty or so who mounted the platform and received the diplomas for the rest. This was too much for Aunt Cecilia, who occupied a prominent place in the front row of the balcony.
"Oh, dear," she sighed, wiping away a furtive tear, "there he goes, and no mother to see him do it! No one to be proud of him! And the brightest of all the family—I shall never live to see a son of mine do as well, never, never!"
"I'm not so sure," said her eldest daughter, comfortingly; "the doctrine of chances is in your favor. You have four boys—four chances to Aunt—what was her name?—Aunt Edith's two. Harry's not so fearfully bright, anyway—only sixteenth out of three hundred."
"My dear, how can you talk so? you ought to be ashamed, after his being so nice to you all this week!"
"Yes, he's been very sweet, indeed," replied the maiden, magnanimously. "Though I don't know, on looking back at it, that he's been any nicer to me than I've been to him!"