e endurance of their youth and charms,
and the views of other people with regard to them. But I am willing,
even anxious, to be quite frank with myself. Since--well, never mind
since what time--I have not cared an iota whether I was considered an
old maid or not. The situation has seemed to me rather amusing, inasmuch
as it has involved a secret willingness to be what everybody has
considered me as very unwilling to be. I have regarded it as a sort of
joke upon other people.

But I think I am honest--I really mean to be, and I think I am--when I
say that outside Eastridge the role of an old-maid aunt is the very last
one which I can take to any advantage. Here I am estimated according
to what people think I am, rather than what I actually am. In the first
place, I am only fifteen years older than Peggy, who has just become
engaged, but those fifteen years seem countless aeons to the child
herself and the other members of the family. I am ten years younger than
my brother's wife, but she and my brother regard me as old enough to be
her mother. As for Grandmother Evarts, she fairly looks up to me as her
superior in age, although she DOES patronize me. She would patronize
the prophets of old. I don't believe she ever says her prayers
without infusing a little patronage into her petitions. The other
day Grandmother Evarts actually inquired of me, of ME! concerning a
knitting-stitch. I had half a mind to retort, "Would you like a lesson
in bridge, dear old soul?" She never heard of bridge, and I suppose she
would have thought I meant bridge-building. I sometimes wonder why it
is that all my brother's family are so singularly unsophisticated, even
Cyrus himself, able as he is and dear as he is.

Sometimes I speculate as to whether it can be due to the mansard-roof
of their house. I have always had a theory that inanimate things exerted
more of an influence over people than they dreamed, and a mansard-roof,
to my mind, belongs to a period which was most unsophisticated and
fatuous, not merely concerning aesthetics, but simple comfort. Those
bedrooms under the mansard-roof are miracles not only of ugliness, but
discomfort, and there is no attic. I think that a house without a good
roomy attic is like a man without brains. Possibly living in a brainless
house has affected the mental outlook of my relatives, although their
brains are well enough. Peggy is not exactly remarkable for hers, but
she is charmingly pretty, and has a w