"Well, Bassford Hollister has two daughters. It's the older one that has stolen Wiggins's heart away. She's Cecilia, you know. Very literary and that sort of thing, and pushed tea and cookies at the Asolando when that idiocy was opened. Wiggins saw her there last spring. Miss Hollister, the aunt,--whom I 'm fond of calling the chevalier,--picked up her nieces about that time and hauled them off to Europe, and Wiggins scampered after them. I don't know what they did to Wiggy, but you see how he acts. I rather imagine that the chevalier did n't smile on his suit. She's a holy terror, that woman, with an international reputation for doing weird and most unaccountable things. She draws a sort of royalty on all the baby-buggies in creation; it amounts to a birth-tax, in contravention of the free guarantees of the Constitution. The people will rise against it some day.
"She's plausible enough, but she's the past mistress of ulterior motive. She got Fortner, the mural painter, up to a place she used to have at Newport a few years ago, ostensibly to do a frieze or something, and she made him teach her to fire a gun. You know Fortner, with his artistic ideals! And he did n't know any more about guns than a flea. It was droll, decidedly droll. But she kept him there a month,--wouldn't let him off the reservation; but she paid him his fee just the same, though he never painted a stroke. When he got back to town, he was a wreck. It was just like being in jail. I warn you to let her alone. If you should undertake to fix her flues she's likely to put you to work digging potatoes. She's no end of a case."
"Well, Wiggins is a good fellow, one of the very best," I remarked, as I absorbed these revelations, "and it is n't the girl's aunt he wants to marry."
"He's a capital fellow," affirmed Jewett, "and that's why it's a sin this had to happen to him. There's no telling where this affair may lead him. There's something queer in the wind, all right. The chevalier has brother Bassford where he can't whimper; I rather fancy he feeds from her hand. His girls have n't any prospects except through the chevalier. Nice girls, so I'm told; but between the father with his vertiginous tendencies and a lunatic aunt who holds the family money-bags, I don't see much ahead of them. Miss Cecilia Hollister is living with her aunt; it's a sort of compulsory sequestration; she has to do it whether she wants to or not. I rather fancy it's to keep her away from Wiggins."