A Modern Chronicle | Page 5

Honora had likewise seen: one end of a
rose-covered villa--which Honora thought was a wing of his palace; a
coach and four he was driving, and which had chanced to belong to an
Englishman, although the photograph gave no evidence of this
ownership. Neither Aunt Mary nor Uncle Tom had ever sought--for
reasons perhaps obvious--to correct the child's impression of an
extraordinary paternity.
Aunt Mary was a Puritan of Southern ancestry, and her father had been
a Presbyterian minister, Uncle Tom was a member of the vestry of a
church still under Puritan influences. As a consequence for Honora,
there were Sunday afternoons--periods when the imaginative faculty, in
which she was by no means lacking, was given full play. She would sit
by the hour in the swing Uncle Tom had hung for her under the maple
near the lattice, while castles rose on distant heights against blue skies.
There was her real home, in a balconied chamber that overlooked mile
upon mile of rustling forest in the valley; and when the wind blew, the
sound of it was like the sea. Honora did not remember the sea, but its
music was often in her ears.
She would be aroused from these dreams of greatness by the
appearance of old Catherine, her nurse, on the side porch, reminding
her that it was time to wash for supper. No princess could have had a
more humble tiring-woman than Catherine.
Honora cannot be unduly blamed. When she reached the "little house
under the hill" (as Catherine called the chamber beneath the eaves), she
beheld reflected in the mirror an image like a tall, white flower that

might indeed have belonged to a princess. Her hair, the colour of burnt
sienna, fell evenly to her shoulders; her features even then had
regularity and hauteur; her legs, in their black silk stockings, were
straight; and the simple white lawn frock made the best of a slender
figure. Those frocks of Honora's were a continual source of wonder and
sometimes of envy--to Aunt Mary's friends; who returned from the
seaside in the autumn, after a week among the fashions in Boston or
New York, to find Honora in the latest models, and better dressed than
their own children. Aunt Mary made no secret of the methods by which
these seeming miracles were performed, and showed Cousin Eleanor
Hanbury the fashion plates in the English periodicals. Cousin Eleanor
sighed.
"Mary, you are wonderful," she would say. "Honora's clothes are
better- looking than those I buy in the East, at such fabulous prices,
from Cavendish."
Indeed, no woman was ever farther removed from personal vanity than
Aunt Mary. She looked like a little Quakeress. Her silvered hair was
parted in the middle and had, in spite of palpable efforts towards
tightness and repression, a perceptible ripple in it. Grey was her only
concession to colour, and her gowns and bonnets were of a primness
which belonged to the past. Repression, or perhaps compression, was
her note, for the energy confined within her little body was a thing to
have astounded scientists: And Honora grew to womanhood and
reflection before she had. guessed or considered that her aunt was
possessed of intense emotions which had no outlet. Her features were
regular, her shy eye had the clearness of a forest pool. She believed in
predestination, which is to say that she was a fatalist; and while she
steadfastly continued to regard this world as a place of sorrow and trials,
she concerned herself very little about her participation in a future life.
Old Dr. Ewing, the rector of St. Anne's, while conceding that no better
or more charitable woman existed, found it so exceedingly difficult to
talk to her, on the subject of religion that he had never tried it but once.
Such was Aunt Mary. The true student of human nature should not find
it surprising that she spoiled Honora and strove--at what secret expense,

care, and self-denial to Uncle Tom and herself, none will ever know--to
adorn the child that she might appear creditably among companions
whose parents were more fortunate in this world's goods; that she
denied herself to educate Honora as these other children were educated.
Nor is it astonishing that she should not have understood the highly
complex organism of the young lady we have chosen for our heroine,
who was shaken, at the age of thirteen, by unfulfilled longings.
Very early in life Honora learned to dread the summer, when one by
one the families of her friends departed until the city itself seemed a
remote and distant place from what it had been in the spring and winter.
The great houses were closed and blinded, and in the evening the
servants who had been left behind chattered on the front steps. Honora
could