opinions and ideals. She did not contemn or
exclude the people who were unlike her, but she had never had any more
contact with them than she now had with the weather of the streets, as
she sat, filling her large arm-chair full of her ladylike correctness, in
the library of the handsome house her father had left her. The irruption
of her brother's son and daughter into its cloistered quiet had scarcely
broken its invulnerable order. It was right and fit they should be there
after his death, and it was not strange that in the course of time they
should both show certain unregulated tendencies which, since they were
not known to be Lynde tendencies, must have been derived from the
Southwestern woman her brother had married during his social and
financial periclitations in a region wholly inconceivable to her. Their
mother was dead, too, and their aunt's life closed about them with full
acceptance, if not complacence, as part of her world. They had grown to
manhood and womanhood without materially discomposing her faith in the
old-fashioned Unitarian deity, whose service she had always attended.

When Alan left college in his Freshman year, and did not go back, but
went rather to Europe and Egypt and Japan, it appeared to her myopic
optimism that his escapades had been pretty well hushed up by time and
distance. After he came home and devoted himself to his club, she could
have wished that he had taken up some profession or business; but since
there was money enough, she waited in no great disquiet until he showed
as decided a taste for something else as he seemed for the present to
have only for horses. In the mean while, from time to time, it came to
her doctor's advising his going to a certain retreat. But he came out the
first time so much better and remained well so long that his aunt felt a
kind of security in his going again and again, whenever he became at all
worse. He always came back better. As she took the cup of tea that Bessie
poured out for her, she recurred to the question that she had partly
asked already:

"Do you think Alan is getting worse again?"

"Not so very much," said the girl, candidly. "He's been at the club, I
suppose, but he left the table partly because I vexed him."

"Because you what?"

"Because I vexed him. He was scolding me, and I wouldn't stand it."

Her aunt tasted her tea, and found it so quite what she liked that she
said, from a natural satisfaction with Bessie, "I don't see wha