However, I found the boy likable, and everything went smoothly for a time, when all at once I felt something had gone wrong—­what, I didn’t know.  Mr. Goward received a telegram and left suddenly.  Ada, I could see, was anxious; Peggy, tearful; and, as if this wasn’t enough, Mrs. Temple, our new neighbor, who had seemed a sensible body to me, had some sort of a falling-out with Aunt Elizabeth, who pretended that Mrs. Temple was jealous of her!  After Mrs. Temple had gone home, Elizabeth Talbert went around pleased as Punch and swore us all to solemn secrecy never to tell any one about “Mrs. Temple’s absurd jealousy.”

“You needn’t worry about me, Aunt Elizabeth,” I said.  “I’m not likely to go around proclaiming that another woman has made a fool of herself.”

Elizabeth Talbert is one of those women who live on a false basis.  She is a case of arrested development.  She enjoys the same amusements that she did fifteen years ago.  She is like a young fruit that has been put up in a preserving fluid and gives the illusion of youth; the preserving fluid in her case is the disappointment she suffered as a girl.  I like useful women—­women who, whether married or unmarried, bring things to pass in this world, and Elizabeth does not.  Still, I can’t help feeling sorry for her, poor thing; in the end our own shortcomings and vanities hurt us more than they hurt any one else.  I heartily wish she would get married—­I have known women older than Elizabeth, and worse-looking, to find husbands—­both for her own sake and for Ada’s, for her comings and goings complicate life for my daughter.  She diffuses around her an atmosphere of criticism—­I do not think she ever returns from a visit to the city without wishing that we should have dinner at night, and Alice is beginning to prick up her ears and listen to her.  She spends a great deal of time over her dress, and, if she has grown no older, neither have her clothes—­not a particle.  She dresses in gowns suitable for Peggy, but which Maria, who is years younger than her aunt, would not think of wearing.  Elizabeth is the kind of woman who is a changed being at the approach of a man; she is even different when Cyrus or Billy is around; she brightens up and exerts herself to please them; but when she is alone with Ada and me she is frankly bored and looks out of the window in a sad, far-away manner.  The presence of men has a most rejuvenating effect on Aunt Elizabeth, although she pretends she has never been interested in any man since her disappointment years ago.  When she got back and found Harry Goward here, instead of relapsing into her lack-lustre ways, as she generally does, she kept on her interested air.