Miss Mattie


Miss Mattie was getting supper, sustained by the comforting thought that
her task was utterly beneath her and had been forced upon her by the
mysterious workings of an untoward Fate. She was not really "Miss,"
since she had been married and widowed, and a grown son was waiting
impatiently in the sitting-room for his evening meal, but her
neighbours, nearly all of whom had known her before her marriage, still
called her "Miss Mattie."

[Sidenote: "Old Maids"]

The arbitrary social distinctions, made regardless of personality, are
often cruelly ironical. Many a man, incapable by nature of life-long
devotion to one woman, becomes a husband in half an hour, duly
sanctioned by Church and State. A woman who remains unmarried, because,
with fine courage, she will have her true mate or none, is called "an
old maid." She may have the heart of a wife and the soul of a mother,
but she cannot escape her sinister label. The real "old maids" are of
both sexes, and many are married, but alas! seldom to each other.

[Sidenote: A Grievance]

In his introspective moments, Roger Austin sometimes wondered why
marriage, maternity, and bereavement should have left no trace upon his
mother. The uttermost depths of life had been hers for the sounding, but
Miss Mattie had refused to drop her plummet overboard and had spent the
years in prolonged study of her own particular boat.