like her, and in the shelter of their opinions and ideals.  She did not contemn or exclude the people who were unlike her, but she had never had any more contact with them than she now had with the weather of the streets, as she sat, filling her large arm-chair full of her ladylike correctness, in the library of the handsome house her father had left her.  The irruption of her brother’s son and daughter into its cloistered quiet had scarcely broken its invulnerable order.  It was right and fit they should be there after his death, and it was not strange that in the course of time they should both show certain unregulated tendencies which, since they were not known to be Lynde tendencies, must have been derived from the Southwestern woman her brother had married during his social and financial periclitations in a region wholly inconceivable to her.  Their mother was dead, too, and their aunt’s life closed about them with full acceptance, if not complacence, as part of her world.  They had grown to manhood and womanhood without materially discomposing her faith in the old-fashioned Unitarian deity, whose service she had always attended.

When Alan left college in his Freshman year, and did not go back, but went rather to Europe and Egypt and Japan, it appeared to her myopic optimism that his escapades had been pretty well hushed up by time and distance.  After he came home and devoted himself to his club, she could have wished that he had taken up some profession or business; but since there was money enough, she waited in no great disquiet until he showed as decided a taste for something else as he seemed for the present to have only for horses.  In the mean while, from time to time, it came to her doctor’s advising his going to a certain retreat.  But he came out the first time so much better and remained well so long that his aunt felt a kind of security in his going again and again, whenever he became at all worse.  He always came back better.  As she took the cup of tea that Bessie poured out for her, she recurred to the question that she had partly asked already: 

“Do you think Alan is getting worse again?”

“Not so very much,” said the girl, candidly.  “He’s been at the club, I suppose, but he left the table partly because I vexed him.”

“Because you what?”

“Because I vexed him.  He was scolding me, and I wouldn’t stand it.”

Her aunt tasted her tea, and found it so quite what she liked that she said, from a natural satisfaction with Bessie, “I don’t see what he had to scold you about.”

“Well,” returned Bessie, and she got her pretty voice to the level of her aunt’s hearing, with some straining, and kept it there, “when he is in that state, he has to scold some one; and I had been rather annoying, I suppose.”

“What had you been doing?” asked her aunt, making out her words more from the sight than from the sound, after all.

“I had been walking home with a jay, and we found Alan trying to get in at the front door with his key, and I introduced him to the jay.”