Amazing Grace, Who Proves That Virtue Has Its Silver Lining. Kate Trimble Sharber
it's like anybody else on the face of the earth their manner is distinctly accusing.
"'Lancelot!'" mother repeated scornfully. "If they had to name him for poetry why didn't they call him Lothario and be done with it!"
The circle again stiffened, as if they had a spine in common.
"Certainly it isn't becoming in you to train this child up with a disrespectful feeling toward Uncle Lancelot," some one reprimanded quickly, "since she gives every evidence of being very much like him in appearance."
"My child like that notorious Lancelot Christie!" mother repeated, then burst into tears. "Why she's a Moore, I'll have you understand—from here—down to here!"
She encompassed the space between the crown of my throbbing head and the soles of my kicking feet, but neither the tears nor the measurements melted Cousin Pollie.
"A Moore! Bah! Why, you needn't expect that she'll turn out anything like you. A Lydia Languish mother always brings forth a caryatid!"
"A what?" mother demanded frenziedly, then remembering that Cousin Pollie had just returned from Europe with guide-books full of strange but not necessarily insulting words, she backed down into her former assertion. "She's a Moore! She's the image of my revered father."
"There's something in that, Pollie," admitted Aunt Louella, who was the weak-kneed one of the sisters. "Look at the poetic little brow and expression of spiritual intelligence!"
"But what a combination!" Aunt Hannah pointed out. "As sure as you're a living woman this mouth and chin are like Uncle Lancelot!—Think of it—Jacob Moore and Lancelot Christie living together in the same skin!"
"Why, they'll tear the child limb from limb!"
This piece of sarcasm came from old great-great-aunt, Patricia Christie, who never took sides with anybody in family disputes, because she hated them one and all alike. She rose from her chair now and hobbled on her stick into the midst of the battle-field.
"Let me see! Let me see!"
"She's remarkably like Uncle Lancelot, aunty," Cousin Pollie declared with a superior air of finality.
"She's a thousand times more like my father than I, myself, am," poor little mother avowed stanchly.
"Then, all I've got to say is that it's a devilish bad combination!" Aunt Patricia threw out, making faces at them impartially.
And to pursue the matter further, I may state that it was! All my life I have been divided between those ancient enemies—cut in two by a Solomon's sword, as it were, because no decision could be made as to which one really owned me.
You believe in a "dual personality"? Well, they're mine! They quarrel within me! They dispute! They pull and wrangle and seesaw in as many different directions as a party of Cook tourists in Cairo—coming into the council-chamber of my conscience to decide everything I do, from the selection of a black-dotted veil to the emancipation of the sex—while I sit by as helpless as a bound-and-gagged spiritual medium.
"They're not going to affect her future," mother said, but a little gasp of fear showed that if she'd been a Roman Catholic she would be crossing herself.
"Of course not!" Aunt Patricia answered. "It's all written down, anyhow, in her little hand. Let me see the lines of her palm!"
"Her feet's a heap cuter!" Guilford advised, but the old lady untwisted my tight little fist.
"Ah! This tells the story!"
"What?" mother asked, peering over eagerly.
"Nothing—nothing, except that the youngster's a Christie, sure enough! All heart and no head."
Mother started to cry again, but Aunt Patricia stopped her.
"For the lord's sake hush—here comes the minister! Anyhow, if the child grows up beautiful she may survive it—but heaven help the woman who has a big heart and a big nose at the same time."
Then, with this christening and bit of genealogical gossip by way of introduction, the next mile-stone in my career came one day when the twentieth century was in its wee small figures.
"I hate Grandfather Moore and Uncle Lancelot Christie, both!" I confided to Aunt Patricia upon that occasion, having been sent to her room to make her a duty visit, as I was home for the holidays—a slim-legged sorority "pledge"—and had learned that talking about the Past, either for or against, was the only way to gain her attention. "I hate them both, I say! I wish you could be vaccinated against your ancestors. Are they in you to stay?"
I put the question pertly, for she was not the kind to endure timidity nor hushed reverence from her family connections. She was a woman of great spirit herself, and she called forth spirit in other people. A visit with her was more like a bomb than a benediction.
"Hate your ancestors?"
At this time she was perching, hawk-eyed and claw-fingered, upon the edge of the grave, but she always liked and remembered me because I happened to be the only member of the family who didn't keep a black bonnet in readiness upon the wardrobe shelf.
"I hate that grandfather and Uncle Lancelot affair! Don't you think it's a pity I couldn't have had a little say-so in that business?"
"Yes—no—I don't know—ouch, my knee!" she snapped. "What a chatterbox you are, Grace! I've got rheumatism!"
"But I've got 'hereditary tendencies,'" I persisted, "and chloroform liniment won't do any good with my ailment. I wish I need never hear my family history mentioned again."
"Then, you shouldn't have chosen so notable a lineage," she exclaimed viciously. "Your Grandfather Moore, as you know, was a famous divine—"
"I know—and Uncle Lancelot Christie was an equally famous infernal," I said, for the sake of varying the story a little. I was so tired of it.
She stared, arrested in her recital.
"What?"
"Well, if you call a minister a divine, why shouldn't you call a gambler an infernal?"
"Just after the Civil War," she kept on, with the briefest pause left to show that she ignored my interruption, "your grandfather did all in his power—although he was no kin to me, I give him credit for that—he did all in his power to re-establish peace between the states by preaching and praying across the border."
"And Uncle Lancelot accomplished the feat in half the time by flirting and marrying," I reminded her.
She turned her face away, to hide a smile I knew, for she always concealed what was pleasant and displayed grimaces.
"Well, I must admit that when Lancelot brought home his third Ohio heiress—"
"The other two heiresses having died of neglect," I put in to show my learning.
"—many southern aristocrats felt that if the Mason and Dixon line had not been wiped away it had at least been broken up into dots and dashes—like a telegraph code."
I smiled conspicuously at her wit, then went back to my former stand. I was determined to be firm about it.
"I don't care—I hate them both! Nagging old crisscross creatures!"
She looked at me blankly for a moment, then:
"Grace, you amaze me!" she said.
But she mimicked mother's voice—mother's hurt, helpless, moral-suasion voice—as she said it, and we both burst out laughing.
"But, honest Injun, aunty, if a person's got to carry around a heritage, why aren't you allowed to choose which one you prefer?" I asked; then, a sudden memory coming to me, I leaped to my feet and sprang across the room, my gym. shoes sounding in hospital thuds against the floor. I drew up to where three portraits hung on the opposite wall. They represented an admiral, an ambassador and an artist.
"Why can't you adopt