This was a great admission for Mrs. Van Buren, who verily believed there was nothing worth her consideration out of Boston unless it were a few families in the immediate vicinity of Fifth Avenue and Madison Square.  She was bent upon making Richard uncomfortable, and could at the moment think of no better way of doing it than contrasting his mother’s “way” with those of her neighbors.  Occasionally Aunt Barbara put her feeble oar into the surging tide, hoping to check, even if she could not subdue the angry waters; but she might as well have kept silent save that Richard understood and appreciated her efforts to spare him as much as possible.  Mrs. Van Buren was not to be stopped, and at last, when she had pretty fully set before Richard his own and his mother’s delinquencies, she turned fiercely on her sister, demanding if she had not said “so and so” with regard to Ethie’s home in the West.  Thus straitened, Aunt Barbara replied: 

“Things did strike me a little odd at Ethie’s, and I don’t well see how she could be very happy there.  Mrs. Markham is queer—­the queerest woman, if I must say it, that I ever saw, though I guess there’s a good many like her up in Vermont, where she was raised, and if the truth was known, right here in Chicopee, too; and I wouldn’t wonder if there were some queer ones in Boston.  The place don’t make the difference; it’s the way the folks act.”

This she said in defense of the West generally.  There were quite as nice people there as anywhere, and she believed Mrs. Markham meant to be kind to Ethie; surely Richard did, only he did not understand her.  It was very wrong to lock her up, and then it was wrong in Ethie to marry him, feeling as she did.  “It was all wrong every way, but the heaviest punishment for the wrong had fallen on poor Ethie, gone, nobody knew where.”

It was not in nature for Aunt Barbara to say so much without crying, and her tears were dropping fast into her motherly lap, where Tabby was now lying.  Mrs. Van Buren was greatly irritated that her sister did not render her more assistance, and as a failure in that quarter called for greater exertions on her own part, she returned again to the charge, and wound up with sweeping denunciations against the whole Markham family.

“The idea of taking a young girl there, and trying to bend her to your ways of thinking—­to debar her from all the refinements to which she had been accustomed, and give her for associates an ignorant mother-in-law and a half-witted brother.”

Richard had borne a great deal from Mrs. Van Buren, and borne it patiently, too, as something which he deserved.  He had seen himself torn to atoms, until he would never have recognized any one of the dissected members as parts of the Honorable Judge he once thought himself to be.  He had heard his mother and her “ways” denounced as utterly repugnant to any person of decency, while James and John, under the head of “other vulgar appendages to the husband,” had had a share in the general sifting down, and through it all he had kept quiet, with only an occasional demur or explanation; but when it came to Andy, the great, honest, true-hearted Andy, he could bear it no longer, and the Bigelow blood succumbed to the fiery gleam in Richard’s eyes as he started to his feet, exclaiming: