Page:The Galaxy, Volume 6.djvu/60

48 were not. Behind the puffs it is drawn back with amazing tightness, and wound into a coil high up upon the head, a fashion not unlike that of to-day, for which the only thing to be said is, that it gives our maidens the quaint, old-fashioned look of an ancient portrait.

The dress is brocaded silk of a grotesque, straggling pattern; the sleeves are slashed, revealing a daintily-embroidered undersleeve; the bodice is modestly décolleté, as became those pinks of propriety, our great-grandmothers.

No one ever looked from this portrait to Aunt Pen without recognizing the original. And the recognition was always followed by the wondering question—Why did she never marry? It is always asked, you know, of every spinster not absolutely plain; curiously enough, too, when one considers the hosts of ugly women who marry.

But this question was always privately put. No one dared ask it of Aunt Pen. Even I, privileged beyond most, shrank from that audacity. Who knew whether lawless curiosity would unveil an angel or a skeleton?

It is many years now since the benediction of her presence first came into our home, and it is only lately she has told me the story.

Our home is like all the homes of this world. It has had its seasons of turmoil, its worries, and its cares, and also its days of quietude, when our souls have ripened in a mellow Indian summer of content; when life has worn on as serenely as this perfect June day wears to its close—to set, so we trust, in golden glory at last.

Our house sits on a hill. There is a green slope to the valley, full all summer of verdure, and the music of the brook, and bird songs. Now autumn has glorified it. The woodlands glow through a tender mist, as flame through smoke; the southwest gently stirs the fallen leaves; the fringed gentian lifts its blue cup by the brook; the golden-rod wastes its splendor by the wayside. The year has indued its royal robes. It dies in kingly magnificence.

All last winter the landscape was a wide waste of snow. For days and days the sun turned his back upon us, or shone with a wintry coldness, more cruel and disheartening than the sombreness of storms. It was winter in my heart, too—dreary, dismal winter.

Paul and I had quarrelled. Or, if not quite quarrelled, we had let a shadow fall between us. Paul was imperious, and I was wilful, Paul would, and I would not. And so we made each other as miserable as we could, and two people who love one another can do a great deal in that way. At last, Paul went away, not in a pet—that I could have forgiven, and there would have been mutual confessions and tears, and the sweetness of peace after warfare. But Paul was altogether too good to get angry. He is one of your exasperatingly perfect people. And so he drew himself up in his coldest, most stoical manner, and told me with killing gravity that I was out of myself, and perhaps he had better go away till I was come to my senses; and then departed. And I was left alone with my remorse, and my tears, and Aunt Pen.

Aunt Pen was knitting placidly in a corner. I stood at the window watching Paul's straight figure as it went sturdily along through the snow, every step taking him farther and farther from me, and feeling very childishly miserably for a grown-up woman.

"Come to the fire, child!" said Aunt Pen. "There is no need for you to get sick because you are unhappy."

I went reluctantly. I was in that wayward mood that I would a little rather have been ill than not.