Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/18

8 Why, your Aunt Emma had been a widow for two years when she was twenty-five."

"Yes, and your Aunt Augusta," reciprocated Aunt Emma from the window, speaking thickly through her pins, "had lost her young man in the war, and was wearing black for him before she was twenty."

"And I," chimed in the invalid in her high whine (she, too, felt the same grievance), "had been engaged to your father six whole years when I was your age."

Reba was familiar with all these facts. Every, birthday her mother and her aunts aired them for her benefit. She ought to have been callous to them by this time. But she wasn't—not quite.

"I don't see," she replied in a hopeless voice, "where you think anybody's to come from—in a place like this." She was gazing at the barren hills.

"Where were any young men to come from in our day?" scoffed Aunt Augusta.

"But you never used to let me go to any of the Church Sociables, or Christian Endeavor Society meetings, you know," Reba gently reminded her tormentor.

"Well, I declare!" exclaimed Aunt Augusta. "A girl with your advantages talking like that! A girl who's had two weeks for I don't know how Augusts ever since she was eighteen years old, at summer resorts on the New Hampshire and Massachusetts coast, talking about Church Sociables! I tell you what, young lady, in our day there was no such thing as a grand-piano in the parlor, nor piano-lessons either." Aunt Augusta was trimming her seam now with a long pair of steel shears. "Nor diamond