"When there is a family of motherless children, and the father is

himself young, it seems hard to require him to live alone for the

rest of his life," she would allow candidly. "Not that I pretend to

say that a connection formed through prudential motives is a real

marriage in the sight of Heaven. Only that there is no human law

against it. And the odds are as eight to ten that an efficient hired

housekeeper would render his home more comfortable, and his children

happier than would a stepmother. As for a woman marrying twice"--her

gentle tone and eyes growing sternly decisive--"it is difficult for

one to tolerate the idea. That is, if she really loved her first

husband. If not, she may plead this as some excuse for making the

venture--poor thing! But whether, even then, she has the moral

right to lessen some good girl's chances of getting a husband by

taking two for herself, has ever been and must remain a mooted

question in my mind."

Her conduct in this respect was thoroughly consistent with her

avowed principles. She was but thirty when her husdand died, after

living happily with her for ten years. Her only child had preceded

him to the grave four years before, and the attractive relict of

Frederic Sutton, comfortably jointured and without incumbrance of

near relatives, would have become a toast with gay bachelors and

enterprising widowers, but for the quiet propriety of her demeanor,

and the steadiness with which she insisted--for the most part,

tacitly--upon her right to be considered a married woman still.

"Once Frederic's wife--always his!" was the sole burden of her

answer to a proposal of marriage received when she was forty-five,

and the discomfited suitor filed it in his memory alongside of

Caesar's hackneyed war dispatch.

She had laid off crape and bombazine at the close of the first

lustrum of her widowhood as inconvenient and unwholesome wear, but

never assumed colored apparel. On the morning on which our story

opens, she took her seat at the breakfast-table in her nephew's

house--of which she was matron and supervisor-in-chief--clad in a

white cambric wrapper, belted with black; her collar fastened with a

mourning-pin of Frederic's hair, and a lace cap, trimmed with black

ribbon, set above her luxuriant tresses. She looked fresh and bright

as the early September day, with her sunny face and in her

daintily-neat attire, as she arranged cups and saucers for seven

people upon the waiter before her, instructing the butler, at the

same time, to ring the bell again for those she was to serve. She

was very busy and happy at that date. The neighborhood was gay,

after the open-hearted, open-handed style of hospitality that

distinguished the brave old days of Virginia plantation-life. A

merry troup of maidens and cavaliers visited by invitation one

homestead after another, crowding bedrooms beyond the capacity of

any chambers of equal size to be found in the land, excepting in a

country house in the Old Dominion; surrounding bountiful tables with

smiling visages and restless tongues; dancing, walking, driving, and

singing away the long, warm days, that seemed all too short to the

soberest and plainest of the company; which sped by like dream-hours

to most of the number.




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