“I'm afraid it means I'm nothing else,” he answered; and while I was glad he was so honest, I couldn't help feeling anxious at having Peggy engaged to a man so unformed in his beliefs. I do not care so much WHAT people believe, for I am not bigoted, as that they should believe SOMETHING, and that with their whole hearts. There are a great many young men like Henry Goward, to-day, who have no fixed beliefs and no established principles beyond a vague desire to be what they call “decent fellows.” One needs more than that in this world.
However, I found the boy likable, and everything went smoothly for a time, when all at once I felt something had gone wrong—what, I didn't know. Mr. Goward received a telegram and left suddenly. Ada, I could see, was anxious; Peggy, tearful; and, as if this wasn't enough, Mrs. Temple, our new neighbor, who had seemed a sensible body to me, had some sort of a falling-out with Aunt Elizabeth, who pretended that Mrs. Temple was jealous of her! After Mrs. Temple had gone home, Elizabeth Talbert went around pleased as Punch and swore us all to solemn secrecy never to tell any one about “Mrs. Temple's absurd jealousy.”
“You needn't worry about me, Aunt Elizabeth,” I said. “I'm not likely to go around proclaiming that ANOTHER woman has made a fool of herself.”
Elizabeth Talbert is one of those women who live on a false basis. She is a case of arrested development. She enjoys the same amusements that she did fifteen years ago. She is like a young fruit that has been put up in a preserving fluid and gives the illusion of youth; the preserving fluid in her case is the disappointment she suffered as a girl. I like useful women—women who, whether married or unmarried, bring things to pass in this world, and Elizabeth does not. Still, I can't help feeling sorry for her, poor thing; in the end our own shortcomings and vanities hurt us more than they hurt any one else. I heartily wish she would get married—I have known women older than Elizabeth, and worse-looking, to find husbands—both for her own sake and for Ada's, for her comings and goings complicate life for my daughter. She diffuses around her an atmosphere of criticism—I do not think she ever returns from a visit to the city without wishing that we should have dinner at night, and Alice is beginning to prick up her ears and listen to her. She spends a great deal of time over her dress, and, if she has grown no older, neither have her clothes—not a particle. She dresses in gowns suitable for Peggy, but which Maria, who is years younger than her aunt, would not think of wearing. Elizabeth is the kind of woman who is a changed being at the approach of a man; she is even different when Cyrus or Billy is around; she brightens up and exerts herself to please them; but when she is alone with Ada and me she is frankly bored and looks out of the window in a sad, far-away manner. The presence of men has a most rejuvenating effect on Aunt Elizabeth, although she pretends she has never been interested in any man since her disappointment years ago. When she got back and found Harry Goward here, instead of relapsing into her lack-lustre ways, as she generally does, she kept on her interested air.
I have always thought that houses have their atmosphere, like people, and this house lately has seemed bewitched. After Mr. Goward left, although every one tried to pretend things were as they should be, the situation grew more and more uncomfortable. I felt it, though no one told me a thing. I fancy that most older people have the same experience often that I have had lately. All at once you are aware something is wrong. You can't tell why you feel this; you only know that you are living in the cold shadow of some invisible unhappiness. You see no tears in the eyes of the people you love, but tears have been shed just the same. Why? You don't know, and no one thinks of telling you. It is like seeing life from so far off that you cannot make out what has happened. I have sometimes leaned out of a window and have seen down the street a crowd of gesticulating people, but I was too far off to know whether some one was hurt or whether it was only people gathered around a man selling something. When I see such things my heart beats, for I am always afraid it is an accident, and so with the things I don't know in my own household. I always fancy them worse than they are. There are so many things one can imagine when one doesn't KNOW, and now I fancied everything. Such things, I think, tell on older people more than on younger ones, and at last I went to my room and kept there most of the time, reading William James's Varieties of Religious Experience. It is an excellent work in many ways. I am told it is given in sanitariums for nervous people to read, for the purpose of getting their minds off themselves. I found it useful to get my mind off others, for of late I have gotten to an almost morbid alertness, and I know by the very way Peggy ran up the stairs that something ailed her even before I caught a glimpse of her face, which showed me that she was going straight to her room to cry.
This sort of thing had happened too often, and I made up my mind I would not live in this moral fog another moment. So I went to Ada.
“Ada,” I said, “I am your mother, and I think I have a right to ask you a question. I want to know this: what has that young man been doing?”
“I suppose you mean Harry,” Ada answered. “He hasn't been doing anything. Peggy's a little upset because he isn't a good correspondent. You know how girls feel—”
“Don't tell ME, Ada,” said I. “I know better. There's more in it than that. Peggy's a sensible girl. There's something wrong, and I want you to tell me what it is.” Younger people don't realize how bad it can be to be left to worry alone in the dark.
Ada sat down with a discouraged air such as I have seldom seen her with. I went over to her and took her hand in mine.