University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.
THE SISTER.

GRACE SEYMOUR was a specimen of a class of
whom we are happy to say New England possesses
a great many.

She was a highly cultivated, intelligent, and refined
woman, arrived at the full age of mature womanhood
unmarried, and with no present thought or prospect of
marriage. I presume all my readers, who are in a position
to run over the society of our rural New-England
towns, can recall to their minds hundreds of such.
They are women too thoughtful, too conscientious, too
delicate, to marry for any thing but a purely personal
affection; and this affection, for various reasons, has not
fallen in their way.

The tendency of life in these towns is to throw the
young men of the place into distant fields of adventure
and enterprise in the far Western and Southern States,
leaving at their old homes a population in which the
feminine element largely predominates. It is not, generally
speaking, the most cultivated or the most attractive
of the brethren who remain in the place where they

were born. The ardent, the daring, the enterprising,
are off to the ends of the earth; and the choice of the
sisters who remain at home is, therefore, confined to a
restricted list; and so it ends in these delightful rosegardens
of single women which abound in New England,
— women who remain at home as housekeepers to
aged parents, and charming persons in society; women
over whose graces of conversation and manner the
married men in their vicinity go off into raptures of
eulogium, which generally end with, “Why hasn't that
woman ever got married?”

It often happens to such women to expend on some
brother that stock of hero-worship and devotion which
it has not come in their way to give to a nearer friend.
Alas! it is building on a sandy foundation; for, just as
the union of hearts is complete, the chemical affinity
which began in the cradle, and strengthens with every
year of life, is dissolved by the introduction of that
third element which makes of the brother a husband,
while the new combination casts out the old, — sometimes
with a disagreeable effervescence.

John and Grace Seymour were two only children of
a very affectionate family; and they had grown up in
the closest habits of intimacy. They had written to
each other those long letters in which thoughtful people
who live in retired situations delight; letters not of
outward events, but of sentiments and opinions, the
phases of the inner life. They had studied and pursued
courses of reading together. They had together organized
and carried on works of benevolence and charity.

The brother and sister had been left joint heirs of a
large manufacturing property, employing hundreds of
hands, in their vicinity; and the care and cultivation
of these work-people, the education of their children,
had been most conscientiously upon their minds. Half
of every Sunday they devoted together to labors in the
Sunday school of their manufacturing village; and the
two worked so harmoniously together in the interests of
their life, that Grace had never felt the want of any domestic
ties or relations other than those that she had.

Our readers may perhaps, therefore, concede that,
among the many claimants for their sympathy in this
cross-grained world of ours, some few grains of it may
properly be due to Grace.

Things are trials that try us: afflictions are what
afflict us; and, under this showing, Grace was both
tried and afflicted by the sudden engagement of her
brother. When the whole groundwork on which one's
daily life is built caves in, and falls into the cellar without
one moment's warning, it is not in human nature
to pick one's self up, and reconstruct and rearrange in
a moment. So Grace thought, at any rate; but she
made a hurried effort to dash back her tears, and gulp
down a rising in her throat, anxious only not to be selfish,
and not to disgust her brother in the outset with
any personal egotism.

So she ran to the front door to meet him, and fell
into his arms, trying so hard to seem congratulatory
and affectionate that she broke out into sobbing.

“My dear Gracie,” said John, embracing and kissing

her with that gushing fervor with which newly engaged
gentlemen are apt to deluge every creature whom they
meet, “you 've got my letter. Well, were not you
astonished?”

“O John, it was so sudden!” was all poor Grace
could say. “And you know, John, since mother died,
you and I have been all in all to each other.”

“And so we shall be, Gracie. Why, yes, of course
we shall,” he said, stroking her hair, and playing with
her trembling, thin, white hands. “Why, this only
makes me love you the more now; and you will love
my little Lillie: fact is, you can't help it. We shall
both of us be happier for having her here.”

“Well, you know, John, I never saw her,” said Grace,
deprecatingly, “and so you can't wonder.”

“Oh, yes, of course! Don't wonder in the least. It
comes rather sudden, — and then you haven't seen her.
Look, here is her photograph!” said John, producing
one from the most orthodox innermost region, directly
over his heart. “Look there! isn't it beautiful?”

“It is a very sweet face,” said Grace, exerting herself
to be sympathetic, and thankful that she could say
that much truthfully.

“I can't imagine,” said John, “what ever made her
like me. You know she has refused half the fellows in
the country. I hadn't the remotest idea that she would
have any thing to say to me; but you see there 's no
accounting for tastes;” and John plumed himself, as
young gentlemen do who have carried off prizes.

“You see,” he added, “it 's odd, but she took a fancy

[ILLUSTRATION] [Description: 706EAF. Page 035. In-line Illustration. Image of a man showing a woman a picture or drawing. The caption reads, "It is a very sweet face."] to me the first time she saw me. Now, you know,
Gracie, I never found it easy to get along with ladies
at first; but Lillie has the most extraordinary way of
putting a fellow at his ease. Why, she made me feel
like an old friend the first hour.”

“Indeed!”

“Look here,” said John, triumphantly drawing out
his pocket-book, and producing thence a knot of rose-colored
satin ribbon. “Did you ever see such a lovely
color as this? It 's so exquisite, you see! Well, she
always is wearing just such knots of ribbon, the most
lovely shades. Why, there isn't one woman in a thousand
could wear the things she does. Every thing becomes

her. Sometimes it 's rose color, or lilac, or pale
blue, — just the most trying things to others are what
she can wear.”

“Dear John, I hope you looked for something deeper
than the complexion in a wife,” said Grace, driven to
moral reflections in spite of herself.

“Oh, of course!” said John: “she has such soft,
gentle, winning ways; she is so sympathetic; she 's just
the wife to make home happy, to be a bond of union to
us all. Now, in a wife, what we want is just that.
Lillie's mind, for instance, hasn't been cultivated as
yours and Letitia's. She isn't at all that sort of girl.
She 's just a dear, gentle, little confiding creature, that
you 'll delight in. You 'll form her mind, and she 'll look
up to you. You know she 's young yet.”

“Young, John! Why, she 's seven and twenty,” said
Grace, with astonishment.

“Oh, no, my dear Gracie! that is all a mistake. She
told me herself she 's only twenty. You see, the trouble
is, she went into company injudiciously early, a mere
baby, in fact; and that causes her to have the name of
being older than she is. But, I do assure you, she 's
only twenty. She told me so herself.”

“Oh, indeed!” said Grace, prudently choking back
the contradiction which she longed to utter. “I know
it seems a good many summers since I heard of her as
a belle at Newport.”

“Ah, yes, exactly! You see she went into company,
as a young lady, when she was only thirteen. She told
me all about it. Her parents were very injudicious, and

they pushed her forward. She regrets it now. She
knows that it wasn't the thing at all. She 's very sensitive
to the defects in her early education; but I made
her understand that it was the heart more than the
head that I cared for. I dare say, Gracie, she 'll fall
into all our little ways without really knowing; and
you, in point of fact, will be mistress of the house as
much as you ever were. Lillie is delicate, and never
has had any care, and will be only too happy to depend
on you. She 's one of the gentle, dependent sort, you
know.”

To this statement, Grace did not reply. She only
began nervously sweeping together the débris of leaves
and flowers which encumbered the table, on which the
newly arranged flower-vases were standing. Then she
arranged the vases with great precision on the mantel-shelf.
As she was doing it, so many memories rushed
over her of that room and her mother, and the happy,
peaceful family life that had hitherto been led there,
that she quite broke down; and, sitting down in the
chair, she covered her face, and went off in a good,
hearty crying spell.

Poor John was inexpressibly shocked. He loved
and revered his sister beyond any thing in the world;
and it occurred to him, in a dim wise, that to be suddenly
dispossessed and shut out in the cold, when one
has hitherto been the first object of affection, is, to
make the best of it, a real and sore trial.

But Grace soon recovered herself, and rose up smiling
through her tears. “What a fool I am making of

myself!” she said. “The fact is, John, I am only a
little nervous. You mustn't mind it. You know,”
she said, laughing, “we old maids are like cats, — we
find it hard to be put out of our old routine. I dare
say we shall all of us be happier in the end for this,
and I shall try to do all I can to make it so. Perhaps,
John, I 'd better take that little house of mine on Elm
Street, and set up my tent in it, and take all the old
furniture and old pictures, and old-time things. You 'll
be wanting to modernize and make over this house,
you know, to suit a young wife.”

“Nonsense, Gracie; no such thing!” said John.
“Do you suppose I want to leave all the past associations
of my life, and strip my home bare of all pleasant
memorials, because I bring a little wife here? Why,
the very idea of a wife is somebody to sympathize in
your tastes; and Lillie will love and appreciate all
these dear old things as you and I do. She has such a
sympathetic heart! If you want to make me happy,
Gracie, stay here, and let us live, as near as may be, as
before.”

“So we will, John,” said Grace, so cheerfully that
John considered the whole matter as settled, and rushed
upstairs to write his daily letter to Lillie.