A Woman Named Smith | Page 2

not by blood but by marriage; she having, when she was no longer what
is known as a spring chicken, met my Great-Uncle Johnny Scarlett and
scandalized all Hyndsville by marrying him out of hand.
I have heard that she was insanely in love with him, and I believe it;
nothing short of an over-mastering passion could have induced one of
the haughty Hyndses to marry a person with such family connections as
his. For my father, George Smith, was a ruddy English ship-chandler
who pitched upon Boston for a home, and lived with his family in the
rooms above his shop; and my grandmother Smith dropped her
"aitches" with the cheerful ease of one to the manner born, bless her
stout old Cockney heart! I can remember her hearing me my
spelling-lesson of a night, her spectacles far down on her old button of
a nose, her white curls bobbing from under her cap.
"What! Carn't spell 'saloon'? Listen, then, Miss: There's a hess and a
hay and a hell and two hoes and a henn! Now, then, d 'ye spell it!"
Not that Mrs. Johnny ever accepted us. It was borne in upon the Smiths
that undesirable in-laws are outlaws. This despite the fact that my
mother's pink-and-white English face was a gentler copy of what her

uncle's had been in his youth; and that when I came along, some years
after the dear old man's death, I was named Sophronisba at Mrs.
Johnny's urgent request.
After Great-Uncle Johnny died, as if the last tie which bound her to
ordinary humanity had snapped, his widow retired into a seclusion
from which she emerged only to sue somebody. She said the world was
being turned topsyturvy by people who were allowed to misbehave to
their betters, and who needed to be taught a lesson and their proper
place; and that so long as she retained her faculties, she would do her
duty in that respect, please God!
She did her duty so well in that respect that the Hynds fortune, which
even civil war and reconstruction hadn't been able altogether to wreck,
dwindled to a mere fifteen thousand dollars; and she wasn't on speaking
terms with anybody but Judge Gatchell, her lawyer. She would have
quarreled with him, too, had she dared.
To the minister, who bearded her for her soul's sake every now and
then, she spoke in words brief and curt:
"You here again? Wanted to see me, hey? Well, you've done it. Now
get out!"
And in the meantime the years passed and my own immediate family
passed with them; but still the gaunt old woman lived on in her gaunt
old house, becoming in time a myth to me, and to Hyndsville as well;
where they referred to her, succinctly, as "the Scarlet Witch." I heard
from her directly only once, and that was the year she sent me a red
flannel petticoat for a Christmas present. After that, as if she'd done her
worst, she ignored me altogether.
My mother had wanted me to be a school-teacher, in her eyes the acme
of respectability. But as it happens, there are two things I wouldn't be:
one's a school-teacher, the other a minister's wife. If I had to marry the
average minister, I should infallibly hate all church-goers; if I had to
teach the average school-child and wrestle with the average
school-board, I should end by burning joss-sticks to Herod.

So I disappointed my mother by becoming a typist. After her death I
secured a foothold in a New York house--I'd always wanted to live in
New York--and went up, step by step, from what may be called a
rookie in the outside office, to private secretary to the Head. And I'd
been a business woman for all of seventeen years when Great-Aunt
Sophronisba Scarlett departed at the age of ninety-eight years and
eleven months, and willed that I should take up my life in the house
where she had dropped hers.
"Oh, Sophy!" cried Alicia Gaines, the one person in the world who
didn't call me Miss Smith. "Oh, Sophy, it's like a fairy-story come true!
Think of falling heir to an old, old, old lady's old, old, old house, in
South Carolina! I hope there's a big old door with a fan-light, and a
Greeky front with white pillars, and a big old hall, and a big old
garden--"
"And an old stove that smokes and old windows that rattle and an old
roof that leaks, and maybe big, big old rats that squeak o' nights," I said
darkly. For the first rapture of the astonishing news was beginning to
wear thin, and doubt was appearing in spots.
"Sophy Smith! Why, if such a wonderful, beautiful, unexpected thing
had happened to _me_--" Alicia's blue eyes