Well, it seems that even minor pleasures have dangers, and that I do not always read characters rightly.  The very evening after my little stroll and renewal of friendship with Ned Temple I was sitting in my room, reading a new book for which the author should have capital punishment, when I heard excited voices, or rather an excited voice, below.  I did not pay much attention at first.  I supposed the excited voice must belong to either Maria or Alice, for no others of my brother’s family ever seem in the least excited, not to the extent of raising their voices to a hysterical pitch.  But after a few minutes Cyrus came to the foot of the stairs and called.  He called Aunt Elizabeth, and Aunt Elizabeth, in her same pink frock, went down.  Cyrus met me at the foot of the stairs, and he looked fairly wild.  “What on earth, Aunt Elizabeth!” said he, and I stared at him in a daze.

“The deuce is to pay,” said he.  “Aunt Elizabeth, did you ever know our next-door neighbor before his marriage?”

“Certainly,” said I; “when we were both infants.  I believe they had gotten him out of petticoats and into trousers, but much as ever, and my skirts were still abbreviated.  It was at Harriet Munroe’s before she was married.”

“Have you been to walk with him?” gasped poor Cyrus.

“I met him on my way to the post-office last night, and he walked along with me, and then as far as his house on the way home, if you call that walking out,” said I.  “You sound like the paragraphs in a daily paper.  Now, what on earth do you mean, if I may ask, Cyrus?”

“Nothing, except Mrs. Temple is in there raising a devil of a row,” said Cyrus.  He gazed at me in a bewildered fashion.  “If it were Peggy I could understand it,” he said, helplessly, and I knew how distinctly he saw the old-maid aunt as he gazed at me.  “She’s jealous of you, Elizabeth,” he went on in the same dazed fashion.  “She’s jealous of you because her husband walked home with you.  She’s a dreadfully nervous woman, and, I guess, none too well.  She’s fairly wild.  It seems Temple let on how he used to know you before he was married, and said something in praise of your looks, and she made a regular header into conclusions.  You have held your own remarkably well, Elizabeth, but I declare—­” And again poor Cyrus gazed at me.

“Well, for goodness’ sake, let me go in and see what I can do,” said I, and with that I went into the parlor.

I was taken aback.  Nobody, not even another woman, can tell what a woman really is.  I thought I had estimated Ned Temple’s wife correctly.  I had taken her for a monotonous, orderly, dull sort of creature, quite incapable of extremes; but in reality she has in her rather large, flabby body the characteristics of a kitten, with the possibilities of a tigress.  The tigress was uppermost when I entered the room.  The woman was as irresponsible as a savage.  I was disgusted and sorry and furious at the same time.  I cannot imagine myself making such a spectacle over any mortal man.  She was weeping frantically into a mussy little ball of handkerchief, and when she saw me she rushed at me and gripped me by the arm like a mad thing.