Julia The Apostate

“You don't think it's too young for me, girls?”

“Young for you--_par exemple!_ I should say not,” her niece replied, perking the quivering aigrette still more obliquely upon her aunt's head. Carolyn used par exemple as a good cook uses onion--a hint of it in everything. There were those who said that she interpolated it in the Litany; but Carolyn, who was born Caroline and a Baptist, was too much impressed by the liturgy of what she called The Church to insert even an uncanonized comma.

“Now don't touch it, Aunt Julia, for it's deliciously chic, and if you had your way you'd flatten it down right straight in the middle--you know you would.”

Miss Trueman pursed her lips quizzically.

“I've always thought, Carrie--_lyn_,” she added hastily, as her niece scowled, “that they put things askew to make 'em different--for a change, as you might say. Now, if they're never in the middle, it's about as tiresome, isn't it?”

Elise, whose napkin-ring bore malignant witness to her loving aunt, Eliza Judd, laughed irrepressibly: she had more sense of humor than her sister. It was she who, though she had assisted in polishing the old copper kettle subsequently utilized as a holder for the tongs and shovel, had refused to consider the yet older wash-boiler in the light of a possible coal-scuttle, greatly to the relief of her aunt, who blushed persistently at any mention of the hearth.

She patted the older woman encouragingly.

“That's right, Aunt Ju-ju, argue it out!” she advised.

Miss Trueman winced. She had never accustomed herself to those senseless monosyllables that parodied her name; nor could she understand the frame of mind that found them preferable to the comfortable “Aunt Jule” of the old days.

“Ju-ju!” Strips of unwholesome flesh-colored paste, sugar-sprinkled, dear to her childish heart but loathed by a maturer palate, rose to her mind. There had been another haunting recollection: for months she had been unable to define it perfectly, though it had always brought a thrill of disgust with its vague appeal. One day she caught it and told them.

“It was that dreadful creature Mr. Barnum exhibited,” she declared, “that we didn't allow the children to go to see--Jo-jo, the Dog-faced Boy! You remember?”

Their cold horror, briefly expressed, had shown her that she had trespassed too far on their indulgence, and she spoke of it no more, but the memory rankled.

“It's so strange you don't see how cunning it is,” Carolyn complained; “everybody does it now. The whole Chatworth family have those names, Aunt Ju, and it is the dearest thing to hear the old doctor call Captain Arthur 'Ga-ga.' You know that dignified sister with the lovely silvery hair? Well, they all call her 'Looty.' And nobody thinks of Hunter Chatworth's real name--he's always 'Toto.'”

“And he has three children!”

Miss Trueman sighed; the constitution of the modern family amazed her endlessly. Ga-ga, indeed!

“Do the children call him Toto, too?” she demanded, with an attempt at sarcasm, a conversational form to which she was by nature a stranger.

“Oh, I don't know about that,” Carolyn answered carelessly. “I suppose not. Though plenty of children do, you know. Mrs. Ranger's little girl always calls her mother Lou.”

“Mrs. Ranger--you mean the woman that smokes?”

Miss Trueman's tone brought vividly to the mind a person dangling from disgusted finger-tips a mouse or beetle.

“For heaven's sake, Aunt Jule”--in moments of intense exasperation they reverted unconsciously to the old form--“don't speak of her as if she smoked for a living!”

“I should rather not speak of her at all,” said Miss Trueman severely.

They raised their eyebrows helplessly: Carolyn's irritation was so unfeigned that she omitted a justly famous shrug.

For two years they had devoted an appreciable part of their busy hours to modifying Aunt Julia's antique prejudices, developing in her the latent aesthetic sense that their Wednesday art class taught them existed in every one, cajoling her into a tolerance of certain phases of modern literature considered seriously and weekly by the Monday Afternoon Club, and incidentally utilizing her as a chaperon and housekeeper in their modest up-town apartment.

The first six months of her sojourn had been almost entirely occupied with accustoming herself to the absence of an attic and a cellar; long days of depression they learned, finally, to trace to this incredible source. Later she dealt with the problem of subsisting from eight till one on two rolls and a cup of coffee; successfully, in the ultimate issue, as surreptitious bits of fried ham and buckwheat cakes, with suspicious odors, winked at discreetly by her nieces, witnessed. It would have been unkind, as Elise suggested, to criticise Aunt Ju-ju's performances at the ungodly hour of seven in the morning, when their own correctly Continental repast, flanked by a chrysanthemum in a tall vase, not only tallied so accurately with their digestive and aesthetic necessities, but appeared, moreover, with such gratifying regularity one hour later.

Both Carolyn and her sister had inherited from their mother, Miss True-man's older sister, a real gift for teaching, and this, rather than their respective abilities in art and music, enabled them to impart very successfully the elements of these necessary branches to the young ladies of a fashionable boarding-school just outside the city.

It was politely regretted by their friends that they were unable to give themselves unreservedly to the exercise of their art without the cramping necessity for teaching; but it is probable that both the girls estimated their not too extraordinary talents very sensibly, though far from displeased by a more flattering judgment.

Miss Trueman, who possessed the characteristic veneration of the bred and born New Englander for his native or imported school-ma'am, resented persistently their somewhat patronizing attitude toward the profession second only to the ministry in her stanch respect. A little of the simple grandeur of those childhood days when “the teacher boarded with them” clung with the ineradicable force of habit to her mind, and she could not understand their restive attitude at “the fine positions as teachers Hattie's girls have got.”

“I'm sure you make more money than that Miss Seymour that gets her own meals in her room--she said so herself.”

“Oh, well, there are other things to be considered, Aunt Ju; and, anyway, she's a real bohemian, Polly Seymour. There's a fascination in it.”

“There's no fascination in being hungry that I can see, and she admitted that, L--Elise,” Miss Trueman insisted severely. “I don't understand how she could have done it--I would have died first. And she seemed to think it was a great joke to have her friends give her a dinner--I think it was terrible.”

“Why, Aunt Jule, how ridiculous! We were delighted to do it--it was perfectly dear of her to let us, too. And think of the people we met there--Rawlins and Mr. Ware! You don't mind being poor if such men will come just out of interest in you, I tell you. Do you remember, Elise, how Mr. Rawlins called her 'little girl'? Mr. Ware lets her use his models whenever she likes, too,” Carolyn added respectfully.

“Oh, she's bound to arrive!” Elise agreed.

Aunt Ju-ju sniffed uncontrolledly.

“I should hope she'd arrive at the point where she could buy her own dinners,” she remarked. “To be beholden for your bread”...

Here were two points of view as little likely to coincide as the parallel lines of science, and at some such stage as this the discussions were wont to cease.

To-day the apartment was swept and garnished for a social function long planned by the nieces. Carnations leaned from tall glass vases, intricate little cakes jostled carefully piled sandwiches, and a huge brass samovar, borrowed for the occasion, gave dignity to the small parlor. Miss Trueman had learned by now the unwritten law that prevented the various objects in the once proudly segregated “drawing-room set” from association with each other, and made no attempt to correct their intentional isolation. The samovar she refused utterly to meddle with, assuring them that she would as soon think of running a locomotive.

As the guests began to arrive Miss Trueman found herself regarding them even more critically than usual; an argumentative spirit rose in her, and her calm contradiction of Mrs. Ranger, who discussed with great subtlety the notable advantages--even from the artistic point of view--of the approaching spring when experienced in the city, in comparison with that be-rhymed season's vaunted country beauties, startled more than one person.

“Just because they're more delicate, just because you must look harder to discover them, just because you must get as much from a pot of hyacinths on the Avenue as from a whole field of primroses in the backwoods, you know,” she concluded, and the little circle nodded sagely and congratulated themselves on an unpublished paragraph.

“I don't agree with you, Mrs. Ranger,” said Aunt Ju-ju flatly, to the absolute amazement of her nieces and the tolerant amusement of the assembly. “I guess you haven't lived in the country much, or you wouldn't talk so. And primroses don't grow in fields here, anyway. If you could see my hyacinths and crocuses in round beds at home, you wouldn't mention those poor little stalks in the pots.”

Mrs. Ranger laughed, and directed her searching, level glance at the older woman, who combined in her comely, undisguised middle age something at once more matronly and more childish than the analytic authoress could ever find in her own mirror.