Dearest Mother:  I hope you are coming home soon.  I really think you should.  Aunt Lizzie is here and she brought two friends, and, mother, I feel so responsible for them!  Aunt Lizzie is sane enough, if somewhat cranky; but Miss Tish is almost more than I can manage—­I never know what she is going to do next—­and I am worn out with chaperoning her.  And Miss Aggie, although she is very sweet, is always smoking cubeb cigarettes for hay fever, and it looks terrible!  The neighbors do not know they are cubeb, and, anyhow, that’s a habit, mother.  And yesterday Miss Tish was arrested, and ran a motor race and won it, and to-day she is knitting a stocking and reciting the Twenty-third Psalm.  Please, mother, I think you should come home.

  Lovingly, Bettina.

  P.S.  I think I shall marry Jasper after all.  He says he likes the
  Presbyterian service.

I looked up from reading Eliza’s letter.  Tish was knitting quietly and planning to give the money back to the town in the shape of a library, and Aggie was holding a cubeb cigarette to her nose.  Down on the tennis court Jasper and Bettina were idly batting a ball round.

“I’m glad the Ellis man did not get her,” said Aggie.  And then, after a sneeze, “How Jasper reminds me of Mr. Wiggins.”

The library did not get the money after all.  Tish sent it, as a wedding present, to Bettina.

LIKE A WOLF ON THE FOLD

I

Aggie has always been in the habit of observing the anniversary of Mr. Wiggins’s death.  Aggie has the anniversary habit, anyhow, and her life is a succession:  of small feast-days, on which she wears mental crape or wedding garments—­depending on the occasion.  Tish and I always remember these occasions appropriately, sending flowers on the anniversaries of the passing away of Aggie’s parents; grandparents; a niece who died in birth; her cousin, Sarah Webb, who married a missionary and was swallowed whole by a large snake,—­except her shoes, which the reptile refused and of which Aggie possesses the right, given her by the stricken husband; and, of course, Mr. Wiggins.

For Mr. Wiggins Tish and I generally send the same things each year—­Tish a wreath of autumn foliage and I a sheaf of wheat tied with a lavender ribbon.  The program seldom varies.  We drive to the cemetery in the afternoon and Aggie places the sheaf and the wreath on Mr. Wiggins’s last resting-place, after first removing the lavender ribbon, of which she makes cap bows through the year and an occasional pin-cushion or fancy-work bag; then home to chicken and waffles, which had been Mr. Wiggins’s favorite meal.  In the evening Charlie Sands generally comes in and we play a rubber or two of bridge.

On the thirtieth anniversary of Mr. Wiggins’s falling off a roof and breaking his neck, Tish was late in arriving, and I found Aggie sitting alone, dressed in black, with a tissue-paper bundle in her lap.  I put my sheaf on the table and untied my bonnet-strings.