Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/33

Rh which bred some critical hours. Brought up by a Knickerbocker great-aunt in a more cosmopolitan atmosphere, Susan Gilbert's first celebration of Christmas in Amherst with wreaths of laurel in the windows almost upset the family apple cart, and Emily's brother was accused by the scandalized Puritan neighbors of having married a Catholic.

But in all and for all his father was on her side, and came regularly all his life each Sabbath morning for a surreptitious cup of stronger coffee than home thought wise. It was just this freer aspect of life in "Sister Sue" that fascinated Emily and cast such a spell over her from the first. The old house under the tall pines, rebuilt in 1813, and the new house built after a whim of Austin's in the style of an Italian villa, advertised the abyss that lay between the two generations.

The sister, Lavinia, was hardly less brilliant than Emily, but upon her, very early, depended the real solidarity of the family. A coquette from her cradle, very pretty, with a piercing wit and a rather bandit tongue, it became her lot to cover Emily's delinquencies and support her mother's gentle reign, increasingly enfeebled in spite of herself by the dominating daughter, and the powerful family maidservant who grew old along with them for almost forty years of unbroken service. It was Lavinia who knew where everything was, from a lost quotation to a last year's muffler. It was she who remembered to have the fruit picked for canning, or the seeds kept for next year's planting, or the perfunctory letters written to the aunts. It was Lavinia who leaped into the breach, when those unexpected guests drove up at nightfall—tearing her hair over a discrepant larder behind the scenes,