Page:Herbert Jenkins - Patricia Brent Spinster.djvu/254

 For once in her life Miss Brent was nonplussed. She regarded her niece as if she had been a two-tailed giraffe, or a double-headed mastodon. Had she been American she would have known it to be brain-storm; as it was she decided that Patricia was sickening for some serious illness that had produced a temperature.

In all her experience of "the Family" never once had Miss Brent been openly defied in this way, and she had no reserves upon which to fall back. She held personal opinion and inclination must always take secondary place to "the Family." The individual must be sacrificed to the group, provided the individual were not herself. Births, deaths, marriages, christenings, funerals, weddings, were solemn functions that must be regarded as involving not the principals themselves so much as their relatives. Her doctrine was, although she would not have expressed it so philosophically, that the individual is mortal; but the family is immortal.

That anyone lived for himself or herself never seemed to occur to Miss Brent. If their actions were acceptable to the family and at the same time pleased the principals, then so much the better for the principals; if, on the other hand, the family disapproved, then the duty of the principals was clear.

This open flouting of her prides and her prejudices was to Miss Brent a great blow. It seemed to stun her. She was at a loss how to proceed;