People of the Whirlpool | Page 6

one of a handsome unlit lamp. She seems to be superintending the work by coming up now and then, and I met her at the butcher's where she was buying sweetbreads--"a trifle for luncheon." Accusation No. 1, against the Whirlpoolers: Since their advent sweetbreads have risen from two pairs for a quarter, and "thank you kindly for taking them off our hands," to fifty cents to a dollar a "set." We no longer care for sweetbreads!
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I was therefore amused, but no longer surprised, at the exaggerated way in which the childless Lady of the Bluffs,--her step-daughter having ten years back made a foolish foreign marriage,--gave me her views upon the drawbacks of the daughters of her world, when she made me, on her return from a European trip, a visit upon the twins' first birthday,--bearing, with her usually reckless generosity, a pair of costly gold apostle spoons, as she said, "to cut their teeth on." I admired, but frugally popped them into the applewood treasure chests that father has had made for the boys from the "mother tree," that was finally laid low by a tornado the winter of their birth and is now succeeded by a younger one of Richard's choice.
"My dear woman," she gasped, turning my face toward the light and dropping into a chair at the same time, "how well you look; not a bit upset by the double dose and sitting up nights and all that. But then, maybe, they sleep and you haven't; for it's always the unexpected and unusual that happens in your case, as this proves. But then, they are boys, and that's everything nowadays, the way society's going, especially to people like you, whose husband's trade, though pretty, is too open and above-board to be a well-paying one, and yet you're thoroughbreds underneath." (Poor vulgar soul, she didn't in the least realize how I might take her stricture any more than she saw my desire to laugh.)
"Of course here and there a girl in society does turn out well and rides an elephant or a coronet,--of course I mean wears a coronet,--though ten to one it jams the hairpins into her head, but mostly daughters are regular hornets,--that is, if you're ambitious and mean to keep in society. Of course you're not in it, and, being comfortably poor, so to speak, might be content to see your girls marry their best chance, even if it wasn't worth much a year, and settle down to babies and minding their own business; but then they mightn't agree to that, and where would you and Evan be?
"This nice old house and garden of yours wouldn't hold 'em after they got through with dolls, and some girls don't even have any doll-days now. It would be town and travel and change, and you haven't got the price of that between you all, and to keep this going, too. You'd have to go to N'York, for a couple of months at least, to a hotel, and what would that Evan of yours do trailing round to dances? For you're not built for it, though I did once think you'd be a go in society with that innocent-wise way, and your nose in the air, when you don't like people, would pass for family pride. I'd wager soon, in a few years, he'd stop picking boutonnières in the garden every morning and sailing down to that 8:15 train as cool as if he owned time, if those boys were girls! Though if Jenks-Smith gets the Bluff Colony he's planned under way next spring, there'll soon be some riding and golfing men hereabouts that'll shake things up a bit,--bridge whist, poker, and perhaps red and black to help out in the between-seasons." (I little thought then what this colony and shaking would come to mean.)
"Money or not, it's hard lines with daughters now--work and poor pay for the mothers mostly. You know that Mrs. Townley that used to visit me? He was a banker and very rich; died four years ago, and left his wife with one son, who lived west, and five daughters, four that travelled in pairs and an odd one,--all well fixed and living in a big house in one of those swell streets, east of the park, where never less than ten in help are kept. Well, if you'll believe it, she's living alone with a pet dog and a companion, except in summer, when the Chicago son and his wife and babies make her a good visit down at North East, the only home comfort she has.
"All the girls married to foreigners? Not a blessed one. Two were bookish and called literary, but not enough to break out into anything; they didn't agree with society (had impossible foreheads that ran