Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/88

 familiarity. She took children too hard both for good and evil, and had an oppressive air of expecting subtle things of them, so that going to see her was a good deal like being taken to church and made to sit in a front pew."

But Mrs. Penniman was as romantic as she was inaccurate ("it must be delightful," she said, "to think of those who love us among the ruins of the Pantheon"), and it needed but the attentions of an heiress-hunting young man to convert the poor little heroine of the story, weak at every point save her affections, unattractive, ungifted, into a heroine of romance in her aunt's eyes, the father's opposition only making the situation more dramatic, and—"Mrs. Penniman's real hope was that the girl would make a secret marriage, at which she should officiate as brideswoman or duenna. She had a vision of this ceremony being performed in some subterranean chapel—subterranean chapels in New York were not frequent, but Mrs. Penniman's imagination was not chilled by trifles—and of the guilty couple—she liked to think of poor Catherine and her suitor as the guilty couple—being shuffled away in a fast whirling vehicle to some obscure lodging in the suburbs, where she would pay them (in a thick veil) clandestine visits, where they would endure a period of romantic privation, and where ultimately, after she should have been their earthly providence, their intercessor, their advocate, and their medium of communication with the world, they should be reconciled to her brother in an artistic tableau, in which she herself should be, some how, the central figure."

But apart from the context, deprived of the contrast afforded her by the matter-of-fact sincerity of her niece, the dry perspicuity of her brother, Aunt Penniman's figure cannot be made to stand as firmly as in the novel. Indeed, humour is so volatile a thing, the perception of it requires so delicate a sensibility, that the mood cannot