East Angels: A Novel. Woolson Constance Fenimore
that cold ocean again, I have suddenly made up my mind to come down and join you under the blue sky you have discovered down there – Egypt, you say, Egypt without the ruins; but as I am a good deal of a ruin myself just now, I shall not mind that lack; in fact, can supply it in my own person. My love to Betty Carew; I shall be delighted to see her again after all these years. Margaret comes with me, of course, and we shall probably follow this letter without much delay."
Winthrop was surprised. He knew that his aunt was fond of what she patriotically called her "own country;" but he should have said that she would not probably consider that there was any of it worth her personal consideration south of Philadelphia, or, at the utmost, south of Baltimore and Washington. This amiably blind lady was, however, a great traveller, in her leisurely way she had taken long journeys across Europe and the East; if she did not know the Mississippi, she knew the Nile; if Shasta was a stranger to her eyes, the Finsteraarhorn and Vesuvius were old friends. Shasta, indeed! – where was Shasta? She had once been to Niagara Falls.
Her nephew smiled to himself as he thought that probably, in her own mind, her present undertaking wore much of the air of an exploring expedition, the kind of tour through remote regions that people made sometimes, and then wrote books about – books with a great many illustrations.
But Mrs. Rutherford would write no books. This lady noticed but slightly the characteristics of the countries through which she passed, she never troubled her mind with impressions, or burdened it with comparisons. She seldom visited "objects of interest," but was always "rather tired" when the appointed hour came, and thought she would lie down for a while; they could tell her about it afterwards. Yet in her easy, irresponsible fashion she enjoyed travelling; she liked new scenes and new people, especially new people. In the evening, after a quiet (but excellent) little dinner, and twenty minutes or so of lady-like tranquillity after it, Mrs. Rutherford was always pleased to see the new people aforesaid; and it could with truth be added that the new people were, as a general thing, equally pleased to see her. She was a handsome, stately woman, with agreeable manners, and so well-dressed that that alone was a pleasure – a pleasure to the eyes; it was an attire rich and quiet, which combined with extraordinary skill the two often sadly dissevered qualities of personal becomingness and adaptation to the fashion of the hour.
Evert Winthrop was much attached to his aunt. Associated with her were the happiest memories of his childhood. He knew that her strongest love had not been given to him, it had been given to her other nephew, his cousin Lansing Harold. But of Lansing she had had entire charge from his birth, he had been to her like her own child, while Andrew Winthrop had kept closely in his own care his motherless little son Evert, allowing him to spend only his vacations with his aunt Katrina – who was spoiling one boy (so thought the New-Englander) as fast as possible, but who should not be permitted to spoil another. These vacations, so grudgingly granted, had been very happy times for the little Evert, and their memory remained with him still. As he grew older he had gradually become conscious of some of the traits and tendencies of his aunt's mind, apart from his boyish idea of her, as we generally do become conscious, by degrees, of the traits (as they are estimated by others) of even those who are nearest and dearest, save in the case of our parents, who remain always, beautifully always, "father" and "mother" to the end, precious beyond all analysis, all comparison. Separating itself, therefore, from the delightful indulgence with which she had sweetened his boyhood days, separating itself from his own unquestioning childish belief in her, there had gradually come to Evert Winthrop (though without any diminution of his affection for her) the consciousness that his aunt's nature was a narrow one. Her narrowness could have been summed up roughly in the statement that her views upon every subject were purely personal ones. It was difficult to realize how personal they were, Winthrop himself, well as he knew her, had only within the past five or six years become fully conscious of the absolute predominance of the principle. No one besides himself had had the opportunity to make the same discovery, save possibly – so he had sometimes thought with a smile – the departed Peter Rutherford, the lady's husband. But Peter Rutherford, among many excellent qualities, had not been endowed with a delicate observation, and indeed having been of a robust and simple nature, he had had small respect for the talent, at least in a man, associating it vaguely with a knowledge of millinery, with a taste for spelling-games and puzzles, for cake and religious novels – things he considered unworthy of the masculine mind. His wife's nephew, however, though not a judge of millinery, and not interested in the mild entertainments and literature referred to, possessed observation in abundance, and with regard to his aunt he had not been able to keep it from exercising itself, at least to a certain degree. He had discovered – he had been unable to help discovering – the secret springs that moved much of her speech; and these springs were so simple that, in a complicated age, they seemed extraordinary. Her opinions of persons (he knew it now) were based entirely upon the narrow but well-defined foundation of their behavior to herself.
Concerning people with whom she had no personal acquaintance, she was utterly without opinions; no matter how eminent they might be, they were no more to her than so much sand of the shore. You might talk to her about them by the hour, and she would listen approvingly, or at least quite without contradiction. People spoke of her, therefore, as very appreciative, and, for a woman, broad-minded. What, in truth, can be more broad-minded in one of the sex most given to partisanship than to be able to listen with unprejudiced attention to the admirers of the Rev. Mr. A., the distinguished High-Church clergyman, and then the very next day to the friends of the Rev. Mr. B., equally eminent, but Low; to the devotees of the C. family, who trace their descent directly from old English barons – passing over, of course, that unimportant ancestor who happened to have been the one to cross to the New World, and who, immediately after his arrival, engaged in blacksmithing, and became in time the best blacksmith the struggling little colony possessed – to listen, I say, to the partisans of this ancient race, and then to hearken the next afternoon with equal equanimity to warm praise of the D.'s, who, having made their great fortune so vigorously in the present generation, are engaged in spending it with a vigor equally commendable – what, indeed, could be broader than this? It never occurred to these talkers that A. and B., the C.'s and the D.'s, alike, were all non-existent bodies, nebulæ, to Mrs. Peter Rutherford so long as she was not personally acquainted with them, so long as their names were not upon her visiting list.
But when once this had been discovered, as Evert Winthrop had discovered it, it made everything clear; it was perfectly easy to understand her, easy to see how simple the opinions appeared to the lady herself, since they had to do merely with a series of facts. If Mr. X. had been polite to her, if he had been attentive, deferential, he was without doubt (if at all presentable) a most delightful and praiseworthy person in every way. If Mr. X. had been civil to a certain extent, yet on the whole rather indifferent, he was a little dull, she thought; a good sort of a man perhaps, but not interesting; tiresome. If Mr. X. had simply left her alone, without either civility or incivility, she was apt to have mysterious intuitions about him, intuitions which she mentioned, confidentially of course, to her friends; little things which she had noticed – indications. Of bad temper? Or was it bad habits? It was something bad, at any rate; she was very ingenious in reading the signs. But if Mr. X. had been guilty of actual rudeness (a quality which she judged strictly by the standard of her own hidden but rigorous requirements), Mr. X. was immediately thrust beyond the pale, there was no good in him; in the way of odious traits there was nothing which she did not attribute to him at one time or another, she could even hint at darker guilt. She wondered that people should continue to receive him, and to her dying day she never forgot to give, upon opportunity, her well-aimed thrust – a thrust all the more effective because masked by her reputation for amiability and frank, liberal qualities.
As, however, people generally were sufficiently attentive, this lady's judgments seldom reached the last-mentioned stage, a condition of things which she herself was the first to approve, because (this was the most curious shade of her disposition) she believed fully in her own opinions, and would have disliked greatly to "have anything to do with unprincipled persons." But the world at large had no suspicion of these intricacies; to the world at large Mrs. Rutherford was a handsome, amiable woman, who, possessing a good fortune, a good house in New York, a good old country-place on the Sound, and much hospitality, was considered to be above petty criticisms – criticisms which would do for people less pleasing, less well-endowed.
But