does expect to be the heroine of her own wedding—at least the central figure; she certainly does not expect to find a rival in a middle-aged maiden aunt. Aunt Helen's idea of middle age was an old-fashioned one—no lip stick or rouge, no perpetual wave or juvenile model contradicted Nature. Small wonder that my sister Gertrude was surprised to find the guests, ushers and at moments even the groom himself drifted away to form part of the circle about Aunt Helen.
In my boyhood she had lived in our house. She was my father's sister; and the Fenellons, who think a lot of themselves—from the point of view of family—believe in sticking together. She had read me stories from mythology, and I had pictured the goddess Diana in her image. She read me fairy tales, and she was always the rescued princess with the golden locks. She read me my first novels, and she was Lucy Bertram, and Rowena and Ethel Newcome. I can shut my eyes and see her now—her fine profile, her slender throat, her elegant clothes photographing themselves on my mind; a sort of perpetual illustration of the book she was reading.
And then there was all the romance and mystery of her broken engagement, the first secret, the first realization I ever had that life was not just breakfast, luncheon, supper and being taken to walk in the park. Suddenly, out of the many tall and indistinguishable strangers who came and went at our house, one—particularly tall and big, with a bushy mustache—stood out through an incomprehensible desire on his part that we should call him Uncle Ormond. We had hardly, with some embarrassment, accomplished this feat when he melted away and, as far as we knew, ceased to exist. It appeared he was not our uncle after all. The servants whispered about him in our presence.
My mother said to my father, “Don't you think we had better explain to the children?” and my father answered with a favorite phrase of his—“I see no necessity.”
Later, when we reached that delightful age when your mother begins to gossip with you about your father's relations behind his back, we heard a little more. By that time Aunt Helen was considered to be old enough to live alone, and she had moved to a little house of her own, much to my regret; but I think my mother, who brought a good deal of robust common sense into the remote aristocracy of the Fenellons' point of view, had always suffered from Aunt Helen's perfection and was not sorry.
“I used to pity Helen's beaus,” my mother would say; “and she had quantities. They always began to feel sooner or later like chimney sweeps in the presence of a little white blossom. If she deigned to read a book or wear a flower they had sent her they almost wept with the sense of their own unworthiness. But Ormond was different. I doubt if he believed so entirely in the dewdrop idea. He was attractive in a rough Newfoundland puppy sort of way. No, I never knew exactly what happened, but I can guess. Poor fellow, he lost his self-control so far as to kiss the tips of her fingers. Helen, confronted with such an example of masculine brutality, fainted away and, when she came to, refused ever to see him again.”
My loyalty to my aunt was a little shocked at my mother's amusement over the picture she had drawn, but I felt there was probably some truth in the sketch. Aunt Helen was extraordinarily unapproachable. She had the personal dignity of an Arab and the gentleness of a good child. I shall always remember seeing her enter the room at a tremendous dinner party to which I had been asked among a few younger, unimportant people. Her rank was transmitted in the butler's tone as he announced “Miss Fenellon”; and when she entered, though she is a small woman, it was like the entrance of a queen, so simple and secure.
My father was devoted to her, and I often wondered if he knew the whole story of her engagement. When I grew old enough to go into business with him—to be his partner as well as his son—I ventured to ask him, but he knew no more than any one else.
The breaking of the engagement had taken place twenty years ago. Now my aunt was over forty, still slim, still long-throated, still with a cameolike profile; but her hair was gray and her color faded. She came to Gertrude's wedding dressed just as a maiden aunt ought to be dressed, in gray and silver, with touches of blue, like the sky on a windy day. In the front pew behind a hedge of white lilies I could see her crying delicately—gentle tears that a cobweb of lace and cambric easily absorbed. They left no trace, except that as she came down the aisle after the ceremony her eyes were shining. I drove back to the house with her. “Why is it,” I said, “that women always cry at weddings?”