In the Shadow of Frivolous Ancestors

— The Little Spinster came of stern Puritanical New HampAneestors. shire stock, and her life had been so full of study and of good works that there had been no place for even the mild diversions of a country town. Propriety was written in every line of her prim, slight figure, and at a tender age one could see that she was destined for spinsterhood. She had studied philology and political economy at the Sorbonne in Paris, and, absorbed in her work, she had passed unscathed through the light-mindedness of the gay city. Then brain and nerve succumbed, and her physician forbade all study, and ordered a long outdoor idleness far from distracting Paris. Her place of retreat was untroubled by railways and telegraphs, and a people lived there who knew not the name of Calvin, and the word “ conscience ” had no meaning to its ears. Far back in the centuries, one ancestor of the Little Spinster bad belonged to the people that were now about her, and she felt at once strangely akin to them. All that she saw seemed to stir sweet misty memories in her brain, even the new faces wearing an oddly familiar look.

They took the Little Spinster to their hearts at once, making much of her, giving dainty feasts for her, bringing pretty gifts, and saying fond, flattering things such as she had never heard before, and which brought a wavering color to her not uncomely face. Encompassed by all sweet observances, with tired nerves lulled to rest by the murmur of the sea, the years seemed to roll backwards. Her cheeks lost their lines, and grew plump and bright ; her hair began to stray about in wayward rings ; she laid aside her bowed spectacles, and assumed a coquettish pair of eyeglasses ; she bought a pair of red slippers, and became dissatisfied with her bonnet. She tied on one of the gay aprons of the country, with its trimmings of worsted balls, and she had been seen to “ hippitty hop ” with the children, the red slippers twinkling merrily.

But this was not the worst. A certain High Official there (a married man, too !) flirted desperately with the Little Spinster, and a flirtation cannot flourish when only one takes part. She who never touched even hard cider in her New Hampshire hills now drank not only with her eyes when the High Official pledged her silently at their feasts. Before she left that land many tender words had been whispered unreproved in her ears (though not in the tongue of the Westminster Catechism, let us at least say that for her), and more than once had that smooth little hand been kissed.

Forgetful of her Moral Obligations, and that to be happy and to make others so is not the Chief End of Man, she let slip one by one some moorings of her cherished propriety, until she felt herself swept away by the current of this new life, which after all was not all new, but seemed to join with some hidden spring in her own being now for the first time revealed.

But unfortunately for the peace of mind of the Little Spinster, she could not dwell always in the Land of Forgetfulness. An invitation which was not to be refused came from her friends the MacNabbs of Scotland, a family who in strictness and uncompromising propriety surpassed even her own people. And, the night she arrived, she left behind in her slumbers that strange new self, and awoke to her old character.

Now, in the evenings, as she sits with the MacNabbs, musing before the fire, knitting a long gray stocking, it is not always the firelight which makes her face so rosy. She is saying to herself, “Oh, was it really I who acted so ? ” and a cold horror seizes her at the thought, “ What if aunt ’Phrony should ever know ! ” Her mind goes back to her childish idea of the judgment day, where, in a kind of circus with raised seats, vast numbers of people listened eagerly as the angel Gabriel (she always thought of him as wearing spectacles) read aloud each person’s sins in thought and deed, all his little hidden weaknesses, his unsuspected errors revealed. She thinks, with a kind of grim despairing humor of the astonishment and dismay of the Blanktown church sewing-circle when her lapses in propriety are proclaimed, those twilight wanderings with the High Official, those kisses on her unresisting hand —and here the Little Spinster, with a jerk of her knitting needles, drops a score of stitches, and the MacNabbs glance up in mild surprise.