The Whole Family | Page 5

distance. In the default of other impertinents to keep in
abeyance we fancy that she exercises her gift upon her younger brother,

who, so far as we have been able to note, is of a disposition which
would be entirely sweet if it were not for the exasperations he suffers
from her. I like to put myself in his place, and to hold that he believes
himself a better judge than she of the sort of companions he chooses,
she being disabled by the mental constitution of her sex, and the defects
of a girl's training, from knowing the rare quality of boys who present
themselves even to my friendly eyes as dirty, and, when not patched,
ragged. I please myself in my guesses at her character with the
conjecture that she is not satisfied with her sister's engagement to a
fellow-student in a co-educational college, who is looking forward to a
professorship.
In spite of her injustice in regard to his own companions, this
imaginable attitude of hers impresses the boy, if I understand boys. I
have no doubt he reasons that she must be right about something, and
as she is never right about boys, she must be right about
brothers-in-law, potential if not actual. This one may be, for all the boy
knows, a sissy; he inclines to believe, from what he understands of the
matter, that he is indeed a sissy, or he would never have gone to a
college where half the students are girls. He himself, as I have heard,
intends to go to a college, but whether Harvard, or Bryant's Business
College, he has not yet decided. One thing he does know, though, and
that is there are not going to be any girls in it. We have not allowed our
invention so great play in regard to the elder members of our neighbor's
family perhaps because we really know something more about them.
Mrs. Talbert duly called after We came to Eastridge, and when my wife
had self-respectfully waited a proper time, which she made a little more
than a week lest she should feel that she had been too eager for the
acquaintance, she returned the call. Then she met not only Mrs. Talbert,
but Mrs. Talbert's mother, who lives with them, in an anxiety for their
health which would impair her own if she were not of a constitution
such as you do not find in these days of unladylike athletics. She was
inclined to be rather strict with my wife about her own health, and mine
too, and told her she must be careful not to let me work too hard, or
overeat, or leave off my flannels before the weather was settled in the
spring. She said she had heard that I had left a very good position on a
Buffalo paper when I bought the Eastridge Banner, and that the town
ought to feel very much honored. My wife suppressed her conviction

that this was the correct view of the case, in a deprecatory expression of
our happiness in finding ourselves in Eastridge, and our entire
satisfaction with our prospects and surroundings. Then Mrs. Talbert's
mother inquired, as delicately as possible, what denominations,
religious and medical, we were of, how many children we had, and
whether mostly boys or girls, and where and how long we had been
married. She was glad, she said, that we had taken the place next them,
after our brief sojourn in the furnished house where we had first lived,
and said that there was only one objection to the locality, which was the
prevalence of moths; they obliged you to put away your things in
naphtha-balls almost the moment the spring opened. She wished to
know what books my wife was presently reading, and whether she
approved of women's clubs to the extent that they were carried to in
some places. She believed in book clubs, but to her mind it was very
questionable whether the time that ladies gave to writing papers on so
many different subjects was well spent. She thought it a pity that so
many things were canned, nowadays, and so well canned that the old
arts of pickling and preserving were almost entirely lost. In the
conversation, where she bore a leading part as long as she remained in
the room, her mind took a wide range, and visited more human interests
than my wife was at first able to mention, though afterward she
remembered so many that I formed the notion of something
encyclopedic in its compass. When she reached the letter Z, she rose
and took leave of my wife, saying that now she must go and lie down,
as it appeared to be her invariable custom to do (in behalf of the robust
health which