living in a brainless house has affected the mental outlook of my
relatives, although their brains are well enough. Peggy is not exactly
remarkable for hers, but she is charmingly pretty, and has a wonderful
knack at putting on her clothes, which might be esteemed a purely
feminine brain, in her fingers. Charles Edward really has brains,
although he is a round peg in a square hole, and as for Alice, her
brains are above the normal, although she unfortunately knows it, and
Billy, if he ever gets away from Alice, will show what he is made of.
Maria's intellect is all right, although cast in a petty mould. She
repeats Grandmother Evarts, which is a pity, because there are types
not worth repeating. Maria if she had not her husband Tom to manage,
would simply fall on her face. It goes hard with a purely patronizing
soul when there is nobody to manage; there is apt to be an explosion.
However, Maria HAS Tom. But none of my brother's family, not even my
dear sister-in-law, Cyrus's wife, have the right point of view with
regard to the present, possibly on account of the mansard-roof which
has overshadowed them. They do not know that today an old-maid aunt is
as much of an anomaly as a spinning-wheel, that she has ceased to
exist, that she is prehistoric, that even grandmothers have almost
disappeared from off the face of the earth. In short, they do not know
that I am not an old-maid aunt except under this blessed mansard-roof,
and some other roofs of Eastridge, many of which are also mansard,
where the influence of their fixed belief prevails. For instance, they
told the people next door, who have moved here recently, that the
old-maid aunt was coming, and so, when I went to call with my
sister-in-law, Mrs. Temple saw her quite distinctly. To think of Ned
Temple being married to a woman like that, who takes things on trust
and does not use her own eyes! Her two little girls are exactly like
her. I wonder what Ned himself will think. I wonder if he will see that
my hair is as red-gold as Peggy's, that I am quite as slim, that there