The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Professional Aunt, by Mary C.E. Wemyss

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Title: The Professional Aunt

Author: Mary C.E. Wemyss

Release Date: May, 2004 [EBook #5736]
Posting Date: April 23, 2009

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PROFESSIONAL AUNT ***

Produced by Sean Pobuda

THE PROFESSIONAL AUNT

By Mary C. E. Wemyss

Chapter I

A boy's profession is not infrequently chosen for him by his
parents, which perhaps accounts for the curious fact that the shrewd,
business-like member of a family often becomes a painter, while the
artistic, unpractical one becomes a member of the Stock Exchange, in
course of time, naturally.

My profession was forced upon me, to begin with, by my sisters-in-law,
and in the subsequent and natural order of things by their children--my
nephews and nieces.

Zerlina says it is the duty of one woman in every family to be an aunt.
By that she means of course a professional aunt. She says she does not
understand the longing on the part of unattached females--the expression
is hers, not mine--for a larger sphere of usefulness than that which
aunt hood offers. She considers that it affords full scope for the
energies of any reasonably constituted woman; and no doubt, if the
professional aunt was all that Zerlina says she should be, she would
have her time fully occupied in the discharging of her duties.

Zerlina cannot see that it is not exactly a position of a woman's own
choosing, although under strong pressure she has been known to admit
that there have been cases in which women have been made aunts whether
they would or no; and she thinks it is perhaps by way of protest against
such usage that they so shamefully neglect their duties in that walk
of life to which their bothers and sister-in-law have seen fit to call
them.

Of course, when an aunt marries, she loses at once all the perfecting
of the properly constituted aunt; and that is a thing to be seriously
considered. Is she wise in leaving a profession for which all her
sisters-in-law think she is admirably fitted, for one which the most
experienced pronounce a lottery?

This is