The day after we returned from Canada to New York I spent looking over
Tom's "personal belongings"--as great a revelation as Aunt Martha's.
His richly bound books, his beautiful furniture, his pictures--
everything was perfect. That night Tom made an announcement: "The
family gets home to-night, and they will come to call to-morrow."

"Why don't we go to the station to meet them?" I suggested.

To-day I appreciate better than I could then the gentle tact with which
Tom told me his family was strong on "good form", and that the husband's
family calls on the bride first. My husband's family came, and I
realized that I was a mere baby in a new world--a complicated and not
very friendly world, at that. Though they never put it into words, they
made me understand, in their cruel, polite way, that Tom was the hope of
the family, and his sudden marriage to a stranger had been a great
shock, if not more.

The beautiful ease of my husband's women-folk filled me with admiration
and despair. I felt guilty of something. I was queer. Their voices,
the intonation, even the tilt of their chins, seemed to stamp these new
"in-laws" as aristocrats of another race. Yet the same old New England
stock that sired their ancestors produced my father's fathers.

Theirs had stayed in Boston, and had had time to teach their children
grace and refinement and subtleties. Mine fought for their existence in
a new country. And when men and women fight for existence life becomes
very simple.