Lady Baltimore | Page 5

known that almost nobody
else is qualified to belong to it, that there springs up immediately in
hundreds and thousands of breasts a fiery craving to get into that body?
You may try this experiment in science, law, medicine, art, letters,
society, farming, I care not what, but you will set the same craving afire
in doctors, academicians, and dog breeders all over the earth. Thus,
when my Aunt--the president, herself, mind you!--said to me one day
that she thought, if I proved my qualifications, my name might be
favorably considered by the Selected Salic Scions--I say no more; I
blush, though you cannot see me; when I am tempted, I seem to be
human, after all.
At first, to be sure, I met Aunt Carola's suggestion in the way that I am
too ready to meet many of her remarks; for you must know she once,
with sincere simplicity and good-will, told my Uncle Andrew (her

husband; she is only my Aunt by marriage) that she had married
beneath her; and she seemed unprepared for his reception of this candid
statement: Uncle Andrew was unaffectedly merry over it. Ever since
then all of us wait hopefully every day for what she may do or say next.
She is from old New York, oldest New York; the family manor is still
habitable, near Cold Spring; she was, in her youth, handsome, I am
assured by those whose word I have always trusted; her appearance
even to-day causes people to turn and look; she is not tall in feet and
inches--I have to stoop considerably when she commands from me the
familiarity of a kiss; but in the quality which we call force, in moral
stature, she must be full eight feet high. When rebuking me, she can
pronounce a single word, my name, "Augustus!" in a tone that renders
further remark needless; and you should see her eye when she says of
certain newcomers in our society, "I don't know them." She can make
her curtsy as appalling as a natural law; she knows also how to "take
umbrage," which is something that I never knew any one else to take
outside of a book; she is a highly pronounced Christian, holding all
Unitarians wicked and all Methodists vulgar; and once, when she was
talking (as she does frequently) about King James and the English
religion and the English Bible, and I reminded her that the Jews wrote
it, she said with displeasure that she made no doubt King James had--
"well, seen to it that all foreign matter was expunged"--I give you her
own words. Unless you have moved in our best American society (and
by this I do not at all mean the lower classes with dollars and no
grandfathers, who live in palaces at Newport, and look forward to
every- thing and back to nothing, but those Americans with
grandfathers and no dollars, who live in boarding-houses, and look
forward to nothing and back to everything)--unless you have known
this haughty and improving milieu, you have never seen anything like
my Aunt Carola. Of course, with Uncle Andrew's money, she does not
live in a boarding-house; and I shall finish this brief attempt to place
her before you by adding that she can be very kind, very loyal, very
public-spirited, and that I am truly attached to her.
"Upon your mother's side of the family," she said, "of course."

"Me!" I did not have to feign amazement.
My Aunt was silent. "Me descended from a king?"
My Aunt nodded with an indulgent stateliness. "There seems to be the
possibility of it."
"Royal blood in my veins, Aunt?"
"I have said so, Augustus. Why make me repeat it?"
It was now, I fear, that I met Aunt Carola in that unfitting spirit, that
volatile mood, which, as I have said already, her remarks often rouse in
me.
"And from what sovereign may I hope that I--?"
"If you will consult a recent admirable compilation, entitled The
American Almanach de Gotha, you will find that Henry the Seventh--"
"Aunt, I am so much relieved! For I think that I might have hesitated to
trace it back had you said--well--Charles the Second, for example, or
Elizabeth."
At this point I should have been wise to notice my Aunt's eye; but I did
not, and I continued imprudently:--
"Though why hesitate? I have never heard that there was anybody
present to marry Adam and Eve, and so why should we all make such a
to-do about--"
"Augustus!"
She uttered my name in that quiet but prodigious tone to which I have
alluded above.
It was I who was now silent.
"Augustus, if you purpose trifling, you may leave the room."

"Oh, Aunt, I beg your pardon. I never meant--"
"I cannot understand what impels