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 man without brains. Possibly