-and I was twenty-seven at the time, too, and loved Maria into the
bargain! And after the wedding, when we came to say good-bye, and I
kissed Aunt Elizabeth--I kissed everybody that day in the hurry to get
away, even the hired man at the door--and said, "Good-bye, Aunty," she
pouted and said she didn't like the title "a little bit."

Now, of course, I wouldn't have anybody think that I think Aunt
Elizabeth was ever in love with me, but I mention these things to show
her general attitude toward members of the so-called stronger sex. The
chances are that she does not realize what she is doing, and assumes
this coy method with the whole masculine contingent as a matter of
thoughtless habit. What she wants to be to man I couldn't for the life
of me even guess--mother, sister, daughter, or general manager. But that
she does wish to grab every male being in sight, and attach them to her
train, is pretty evident to me, and I have no doubt that this is what
happened in poor Harry Goward's case. She has a bright way of saying
things, is unmistakably pretty, and has an unhappy knack of making
herself appear ten or fifteen years younger than she is if she needs to.
She is chameleonic as to age, and takes on always something of the
years of the particular man she is talking to. I saw her talking to
the dominie the other night, and a more spiritual-looking bit of demure
middle-aged piety you never saw in a nunnery, and the very next day when
she was conversing with young George Harris, a Freshman at Yale, at
the Barbers' reception, you'd have thought she was herself a Vassar
undergraduate. So there you are. With Goward she had assumed that same
youthful manner, and backed by all the power other thirty-seven years of
experience he was mere putty in her hands, and she played with him and
he lost, just as any other man, from St. Anthony down to the boniest
ossified man of to-day would have lost, and it wasn't until he saw
Peggy again and realized the difference between the real thing and the
spurious that he waked up.

With all these facts marshalled and flashing through my brain much more
rapidly than I can tell them, like the quick succession of pictures in
the cinematograph, I made up my mind to become Goward's friend in so
far as circumstances would permit. With Aunt Elizabeth out of the way it
seemed to me that we would find all plain sailing again, but how to get
rid other was the awful question. Poor Peggy could hardly be happy