by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

I am relegated here in Eastridge to the position in which I suppose I properly belong, and I dare say it is for my best spiritual and temporal good.  Here I am the old-maid aunt.  Not a day, not an hour, not a minute, when I am with other people, passes that I do not see myself in their estimation playing that role as plainly as if I saw myself in a looking-glass.  It is a moral lesson which I presume I need.  I have just returned from my visit at the Pollards’ country-house in Lancaster, where I most assuredly did not have it.  I do not think I deceive myself.  I know it is the popular opinion that old maids are exceedingly prone to deceive themselves concerning the endurance of their youth and charms, and the views of other people with regard to them.  But I am willing, even anxious, to be quite frank with myself.  Since—­well, never mind since what time—­I have not cared an iota whether I was considered an old maid or not.  The situation has seemed to me rather amusing, inasmuch as it has involved a secret willingness to be what everybody has considered me as very unwilling to be.  I have regarded it as a sort of joke upon other people.

But I think I am honest—­I really mean to be, and I think I am—­when I say that outside Eastridge the role of an old-maid aunt is the very last one which I can take to any advantage.  Here I am estimated according to what people think I am, rather than what I actually am.  In the first place, I am only fifteen years older than Peggy, who has just become engaged, but those fifteen years seem countless aeons to the child herself and the other members of the family.  I am ten years younger than my brother’s wife, but she and my brother regard me as old enough to be her mother.  As for Grandmother Evarts, she fairly looks up to me as her superior in age, although she does patronize me.  She would patronize the prophets of old.  I don’t believe she ever says her prayers without infusing a little patronage into her petitions.  The other day Grandmother Evarts actually inquired of me, of me! concerning a knitting-stitch.  I had half a mind to retort, “Would you like a lesson in bridge, dear old soul?” She never heard of bridge, and I suppose she would have thought I meant bridge-building.  I sometimes wonder why it is that all my brother’s family are so singularly unsophisticated, even Cyrus himself, able as he is and dear as he is.

Sometimes I speculate as to whether it can be due to the mansard-roof of their house.  I have always had a theory that inanimate things exerted more of an influence over people than they dreamed, and a mansard-roof, to my mind, belongs to a period which was most unsophisticated and fatuous, not merely concerning aesthetics, but simple comfort.  Those bedrooms under the mansard-roof are miracles not only of ugliness, but discomfort, and there is no attic.  I think that a house without a good roomy attic is like a