usual, and Maria and I had all we could do to get rid of her.  She seemed to be possessed with the idea that I came there every night to see her, and not a hint in the whole category of polite intimations seemed capable of conveying any other idea to her mind, although she showed at times that even a chance remark fell upon heeding ears, for once when I observed that pink was my favorite color, she blossomed out in it the next day and met me looking like a peach-tree in full bloom, on Main Street as I walked from my office up home.  And while we are discussing other people’s weaknesses I may as well confess my own, and say that I was so pleased at this unexpected revelation of interest in my tastes that when I called that evening I felt vaguely disappointed to learn that Aunt Elizabeth was dining out—­and I was twenty-seven at the time, too, and loved Maria into the bargain!  And after the wedding, when we came to say good-bye, and I kissed Aunt Elizabeth—­I kissed everybody that day in the hurry to get away, even the hired man at the door—­and said, “Good-bye, Aunty,” she pouted and said she didn’t like the title “a little bit.”

Now, of course, I wouldn’t have anybody think that I think Aunt Elizabeth was ever in love with me, but I mention these things to show her general attitude toward members of the so-called stronger sex.  The chances are that she does not realize what she is doing, and assumes this coy method with the whole masculine contingent as a matter of thoughtless habit.  What she wants to be to man I couldn’t for the life of me even guess—­mother, sister, daughter, or general manager.  But that she does wish to grab every male being in sight, and attach them to her train, is pretty evident to me, and I have no doubt that this is what happened in poor Harry Goward’s case.  She has a bright way of saying things, is unmistakably pretty, and has an unhappy knack of making herself appear ten or fifteen years younger than she is if she needs to.  She is chameleonic as to age, and takes on always something of the years of the particular man she is talking to.  I saw her talking to the dominie the other night, and a more spiritual-looking bit of demure middle-aged piety you never saw in a nunnery, and the very next day when she was conversing with young George Harris, a Freshman at Yale, at the Barbers’ reception, you’d have thought she was herself a Vassar undergraduate.  So there you are.  With Goward she had assumed that same youthful manner, and backed by all the power other thirty-seven years of experience he was mere putty in her hands, and she played with him and he lost, just as any other man, from St. Anthony down to the boniest ossified man of to-day would have lost, and it wasn’t until he saw Peggy again and realized the difference between the real thing and the spurious that he waked up.