Page:The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson (1924).pdf/34

14 but advancing all smiles and self-congratulation to receive the unwelcome invaders as they came up the double set of stone steps and into the front hall.

If Emily had been less Emily, Lavinia might have been more Lavinia. As it was, Lavinia carried the family honor to her grave as a sacred but rather acrid burden, and a few angels may have wept over her load when she laid it down, for sake of the self-renunciation its integrity implied. It was Lavinia who was thrown to the lions of every phase of dreary social duty, as she threw herself to those same beasts of anxious household routine. Always a brilliant mimic, a wit and wag, none could surpass her in her representations of the family circle, and in imitating the bass viol of the country choir her skill was supreme. She was said to be able to make her nose turn up at will, if her caricature demanded it, and when nothing aroused her animosity there was no one more amusing—not even Emily herself, whose bodyguard she became in their early thirties. Each had her own inner intimacies, and her own admirers in due time, and many they shared, but there is loving tribute due to the younger sister who must have always felt Emily's peculiar genius as distinguishing her apart and above, and who proudly stood aside for her while many, many sought her out. They were so vividly Martha and Mary that it seems trite to call up the parallel: Lavinia with her wearing rectitude in household affairs, Emily with her sublime disregard of all detail; one living in the seen, the other in the unseen and scarcely to be imagined; both in adoring subjection to their parents, both jealously involved in their only brother's success and happiness. And among them an outsider, differing in tradition and