Various

By Harriet Whitney Durbin

In the house of Lawrence there were many daughters, and the eldest thereof was Elvira.

At the age of thirty-two Elvira, to the budding younger Lawrences, was hopelessly aged and sere, and Eulalie, in particular, a lately opened blossom of eighteen, made it a matter of daily duty to keep Elvira’s soul from closing its eyes, even in the briefest nap, upon this fact.

Elvira had grown into her spinsterhood without rebellion and with the quietude of mind conferred by an even disposition. She had been a trifle old-maidish in her youth. That was in the era of bangs and frizzes and heads of hair that resembled ill-used dish mops.

“Gaudy but not neat,” had been Elvira’s comment, and she let her light brown locks lie softly close to her head, undipped and unkinked. And mankind, with eyes accustomed to the ever present moppy snarls and curls, vaguely supposed Elvira to be behind the times, and amiably passed her by.

Later, Elvira developed the spinsterly accomplishment of darning her own delicate silk stockings to finished perfection, and was promptly importuned by all the young Lawrences to darn theirs. She consented—and her doom was pronounced.

When twenty-five years of life had deepened the smooth pink of Elvira’s cheek and amplified the lissome curves of her figure, her next younger sister, Hazel, a girl of twenty-two, had asked her to sit in the drawing room and play propriety on the evenings when the younger sister received callers, and she had done so.

When the matrimonial destiny of Hazel was fulfilled, Marion was coming forward to be chaperoned; then Rosamond; and now—thorniest bud on the Lawrence family tree—Eulalie was fully blown, and quite alive to the beguilements of dress and the desirability of beaux.

Eulalie’s exactions were upsetting to the tranquil mind. Eulalie wanted—not possession of the earth, but to be the earth, and to be duly revolved around by friends, relatives and countless planetary lovers. Elvira’s days grew turbid and her nights devoid of repose.

There had been no comforting maternal support to nestle against since the birth of the youngest Lawrence flower, and the paternal bush towered out of reach in an aloof atmosphere of bonds and rentals and dividends. One old-fashioned point of view he enforced upon his children’s vision: the elder daughter must supervise and chaperon the younger ones to the last jot, and it must be done without disturbance of the business atmosphere.

So Elvira warred with her daily briers alone. Reproach and appeal alike spattered off Eulalie’s buoyant nature as a water sprinkler’s steadiest shower rolls in globules from the crisp, unmoistened leaves of the nasturtium.

“Spinsters are so fussy,” she deplored, comfortably. “Just because they have no beaux themselves, they can’t bear to see a girl have a caller now and then.”

“My dear, keep up a slight acquaintance with truth,” besought Elvira; “a caller now and then would give me a chance to mend my stockings and to get to bed by nine o’clock a few nights in the week. As it is, I have to idle my time away evening after evening, sitting and grinning at your flocks and herds of young men until I am so sleepy I have to go and coax pa to drop a big slipper on the floor overhead, to indicate that it’s bedtime. Hazel and Marion and Rosamond encouraged only a moderate number of beaux, and them only until they naturally paired off with the right ones and could scat the rest off. But you hang on to them all. There is hardly an evening you don’t have from one to five on hand, though you surely can’t want them.”

Eulalie giggled joyously.

“I do want them—every tinker of them. Poor old girl, you never knew the fun of keeping a lot of men in a continual squirm. However, I think possibly what you call the ‘right one’ is bobbing up.”

“Most fervently do I hope so,” sighed Elvira.

The strain of excessive chaperoning was wearing upon her.

“Your sister looks tired,” a late acquisition of Eulalie’s made observation, compassionately, one evening, seeing Elvira nod over her uncongenial Battenberg-ing by the piano lamp.

“Yes—she’s such an early-to-bed crank,” Eulalie cheerfully replied, “and I suppose it isn’t a lot of fun to sit over there alone doing Battenberg with us chatting just out of good hearing range.”

Hugh Griswold had been blessed with a good, old-fashioned mother, and among the precepts bequeathed her son had been one not so distant of kinship from the Golden Rule:

“Treat everybody well.”

“Suppose we move into good hearing range, then?” he suggested.

“Oh, you can go, if you want to.” Eulalie’s eyebrows curved into brown velvet crescents. “I’m very well satisfied here. Did I tell you Major Yates was going to bring me a pair of guinea pigs to-morrow?”

The next time Hugh Griswold called he brought his uncle, an elderly widower, with a bald, intellectual forehead and large billows of whisker. The uncle beamed upon Eulalie with fatherly benignance, and then established friendly communication with Elvira.

“I thought it might brisk things up a little for Miss Elvira to let him come.” Hugh’s apologetic tone seemed, somehow, the result of Eulalie’s upward-arching eyebrows.

“Oh,” said she—a cool little crescendo.

II.

A demure black bow in Elvira’s hair drew Eulalie’s inquisitive glance at dinner the next evening.

“Since when have you taken to vain adornments?” she asked, an edgy emphasis on the pronoun. “It’s miles out of style, you know.”

Elvira received the information with tranquillity.

“Since when have you taken to observing what I wore? Same old bow that has decked me for some weeks. I never regarded it as the latest importation.”

“Oh! I didn’t know but you fancied Mr. Griswold’s uncle was coming again.”

“Not having learned to fish in my youth, I should hardly begin now.” Elvira partook peacefully of her soup.

Mr. Griswold’s uncle came again. When it was time to depart his nephew had to remind him of the fact.

“Your sister’s conversation is so deeply engrossing,” he apologized, blandly, to Eulalie.

“Is it?” Eulalie asked, languidly remote.

Several new varieties of thorn outcropped in Elvira’s daily walk. So small a point as a new stock collar, sober gray though it was, occasioned one.

“No doubt Mr. Griswold’s uncle will find it ‘so engrossing.’” Eulalie’s voice was sourly satirical, and her soft eyebrows made sharp angles.

Elvira stared in hopeless amaze at her grasping sister.

“She had two new young men yesterday—can it be possible she wants Mr. Courtenay, too?” wondered the harassed elder.

A loosening of the tension on Elvira’s strained nerves came with the visit of Marion, the third daughter of the house, for this fact dovetailed neatly with a request from Hazel, the second daughter. She was not very well; was run down, and needed the tonic of companionship from home. Would Elvira come for a while and be the medicine? Possibly a change would do the latter good, and prove a reciprocal tonic.

“Tonic! It would be a balm of Gilead—an elixir of life—a sojourn at the fountain of youth and happiness for me to get away from the chaperoning of Eulalie for a while,” Elvira admitted.

“Then go.” Marion settled the question for her with kindly dispatch. “I’ll look after the minx, and tell her some useful truth now and then, too.”

III.

“Bless your scolding curls—you look as pretty and sweet and out of style as a fashion plate of ’65.”

Hazel had raked Elvira’s hat off and was weaving her fingers through the flat, brown bands of her sister’s hair.

“A neat pompadour, with an empire knot, would make an up-to-date etching of you.”

Then she caught her by the shoulder and pulled her up in front of a mirror, snuggling her own face down beside Elvira’s. “Look there—I’ve a mind to pinch you; you’re three years older than I. What do you mean by looking at least eight younger, and just like a big peach, at that—hey?”

“Maybe it’s because I don’t frazzle up years of good vitality over little everyday snarls,” Elvira replied, serenely, but added, more meekly, “I’ve been very near to it lately, though, with Eulalie and her young men.”

“Eulalie—yes; she ought to be cuffed a time or two; I know her. Look here, Elv, you’ve simply got to let me fix you a pompadour and have your seams made straight. You’d have a presence to eclipse us all if you’d spunk up to your dressmaker and not let her put off crooked gores on you. I’m going to fix you.”

“I thought I came here to nurse you.”

“Oh, well, you can coddle me sometimes, when I think I’m getting yellow and peaked. But it’s a whole lot of potions and powders just to have you here. All the same, I had another little nail to drive in importing you. I’ve got an old boy picked out—the baron we call him. He’s a worthy soul—upright and straight walking as you please, so it needn’t be any obstacle to you that he owns a whole bunch of mills a few miles out. He isn’t here now, but soon will be, looking after the mills, and you’ve got to see him. He’s quite a bit older than you, but that’s no odds. His name is Courtenay——”

“Erastus?”

“How did you come by it so glibly?”

“One of Eulalie’s planets has an uncle named that. He brought him to the house a few times, to brighten up my desert island.”

“Oh, sweet innocence! So you know him! Then the romance is already cut and basted.”

“There isn’t a rag of romance about it. Mr. Courtenay hasn’t tendered me his heart and his mills; I should not take them if he did so. Besides, I have a glimmer that Eulalie has her eye upon him.”

“Did you ever know of a breathing man Eulalie did not have her eye upon?”

“Barring tramps, not one. Still, Mr. Courtenay might distance the field. Besides, again, Mr. Griswold says he—the uncle—vowed long ago to remain forever true to the memory of his first wife.”

“Yes,” reflected Hazel, “that is so final! But you’ll let me pompadour your hair?”

“Oh, I don’t care—if you don’t pomp it too loudly.”

Two weeks later Hazel wrote a letter to Marion, containing this item:

Elvira has lost the little up-and-down worry wrinkle between her eyes—the only one she had; she looks about twenty-two. Mr. Erastus Courtenay has come to Lindale to inspect his mills, but he hasn’t seen the inside of one of them yet. He is here a great deal.

And this postscript was appended:

Tubs wouldn’t hold the roses Mr. Courtenay squanders on Elvira.

Marion incautiously read the letter to Eulalie, and a tempest was at once put to steep in a teapot.

“Oh, brag to me about your modest, self-sacrificing spinsters! Mighty agreeable and willing was Miss Elvira to go and be a tonic to Madame Hazel—and, incidentally, be handy for a rich mill owner to waste roses on! The pair of them! Didn’t know anything about it until she got to Lindale? You’re green enough for sheep to eat if you think she wasn’t planning it all ever since she heard of Hugh’s uncle. She knew he would be going to Lindale soon, and mighty easy it was for her and Hazel to cook up a plot to have her there when he came. ‘Oh, my, such a surprise to meet you here, Mr. Courtenay!’” Eulalie gave an imitation of Elvira’s imagined giggle. “She’s got to come straight home again—that’s what she has.”

“My stars, Laly,” besought Marion, “don’t beat up a tornado about it. What is it to you if Elvira does marry Hugh’s uncle, or anybody she sees fit?”

“She has no business—it’s absurd at her age.”

“Thirty-two isn’t decrepit.”

“It’s too old for such didoes. And she knows that Mr. Courtenay has vowed never to marry again, and that Hugh will inherit the mills if he doesn’t.”

“Oh, that’s the snag! But you are not engaged to Hugh, are you?”

“No, not yet.”

“Did Elvira know you had intentions that way?”

“She might have known I’d take him when I got ready if she kept her webs away from that old donkey of an uncle.”

“What mortal, do you presume to say, could divine which one of your ninety and nine misguided admirers you were going, when you get good and ready, to favor with the empty husk of your frivolous little heart? And if anyone could tell, what law or statute have you against Elvira’s equal right to the mills, provided she loves the miller?”

“It’s scandalous!” Eulalie flew back to her grievance, unmindful of Marion’s logic. “She’s got to come back where I can keep an eye on her. And if the old guinea comes after her, I’ll cut her out and marry him.”

IV.

Those tubs of roses Hazel had touched upon buried their thorns sharply in Eulalie’s memory. That any son of Adam could see her bewildering self and then give roses to Elvira was preposterous—besides, the mills would follow. An end must be to the folly.

She invoked Hugh Griswold’s assistance. He ought to see that the roses might crowd him away from his inheritance.

“I’m afraid I ought to tell you something,” she regretted, amiably. “I hear Elvira is plainly fishing for your uncle.”

Hugh grinned comfortably.

“If there is any fishing doing, I rather reckon it’s on uncle E.’s side of the pond,” he said, easily.

“She has no business to let him, then!” Eulalie’s eyes began to sparkle out blue fire. “A sly old minx she is! She——”

Hugh was looking intently at her, as if he saw her in some weird, new light. She tapered off suddenly, and grew plaintive.

“I want her back here, anyway. I’m not well, and Marion is cross to me.”

“I’ll stop and tell her so as I go through Lindale, on my annual camping tramp—shall I?”

“Oh, yes, do—please do,” Eulalie pleaded, sweetly.

During the few days before his departure she grew pale and languid, and reminded him frequently of his promise.

“Be sure and send her right home,” she urged. “Tell her I’m sick and miserable, and Marion doesn’t treat me well.”

V.

“Is Laly’s illness a matter of doctors and drugs, or is it a becoming little paleness in a pink tea-gown?” wrote Hazel to Marion, after the arrival of Eulalie’s ambassador, with her royal message. ”If it is at all serious, Elvira will go home at once. If it isn’t, I would like to keep her a while. She has refused the man of the mills, but I think he is trembling on the brink of another proposal, from which I hope a different result.”

Marion wrote back:

“Tell Elvira to stay as long as she likes. Laly’s pallor came out of her powder box. She eats rations enough for two.”

When Hugh returned Eulalie made bitter moan about her hapless lot.

“I’ve been so hunted and harassed by autumn dudes that I didn’t want, and their bleating autos, I haven’t had the peace of a cat. And you stayed away so, and Elvira has utterly abandoned me. She never came home.”

“Your sister Hazel wouldn’t let her,” said Hugh, looking inquisitively at Eulalie’s healthful bloom.

“Oh, I got along. And I suppose those roses went to her head, poor old dear; it’s such a new thing for her to have them given her. Didn’t she chant pÆans over them?”

“You couldn’t notice any pÆans,” said Hugh, “but several fellows were trying to chant proposals to her besides uncle E. Ginger! but you ought to see Elvira now, Miss Eulalie; she’s all dimply and pink, and her hair isn’t slick, like it used to be, though it isn’t messy, either; it’s kind of crimpled up high, some way, like you’d raveled out a brown silk dress and piled up the ravelings. She wears new kind of things, too—dresses with jig-saw things—you know what I mean, frilly tricks that make you think of peach blossoms, or pie plant when it’s cooked and all pink-white and clear. Why, it’s true as preaching. I never knew her until I met her there at Lindale.”

“So my prim, old-maid sister has turned butterfly since she went gadding?”

“No, she isn’t a butterfly; she’s too well supplied with brains for that; she couldn’t keep that bunch of old worldlings hypnotized as she does if she hadn’t a pile of original ideas of her own, though the dimples and frillicues may have caught them in the first place.”

“Huh!” commented Eulalie, shortly. “I wonder how you happened to get so well acquainted with her, just passing through Lindale.”

“I couldn’t have,” Hugh owned; “takes time to learn to appreciate a girl like that. If it hadn’t been for your message, I suppose I never should have gone beyond the preface of her character; but when I saw the whirlwind she had stirred up among the dry leaves of the elderly boys’ hearts, I concluded to postpone the tramping trip and watch the fun a while. Honestly, she was a new experience to me.”

“I’m surprised to hear of her frivolity.” A slight, shrewish flavor crept into Eulalie’s smooth voice. “The way she used to persecute me for having a few beaux——”

“Oh, she doesn’t want them, nor encourage them,” Hugh quickly explained. “She just stays still, like a lamp, you know, that shines out soft and clear because it can’t help it, and they go bumping along and sizzle their wings. It isn’t her doings. They’re mostly all too old for her—why, do you know, Miss Eulalie, I had supposed she was older than I, and I discovered she was two years younger?”

“I hope that won’t prevent her being a good aunt to you,” mused Eulalie, with restrained spite.

Hugh laughed, cheerily.

“She won’t be any kind of an aunt to me—to uncle E.’s disgust. I did think he deserved a free field, because he discovered her in the chrysalis—when he came here with me; and he got it, so far as I was concerned. But he admitted to me that he thought it folly to keep on butting your head against a perfectly immovable wall, alluring as the wall might be; that he should go back to his mills and his former resolution and keep off the battlefield of love forever after. So then I concluded to give up my tramp entirely for this year and see if I could make a go with Cupid—and—a—Elvira is having a wedding dress made, and is going to accept me as a wedding present.”