With his sisters the case was somewhat different, as I began to suspect not long after my own private discovery. They were a little older than Charles, and had better opportunities of watching their mother at close range. Helen married, when she was about twenty-five, a man of her own age, who eventually became one of the most prominent editors in New York--Henry Wakefield Bradford. She made him a good wife, no doubt, and had some share in his success both as debtor and as creditor. Whether she loved him or not, she supported his interests loyally. Though she had made an escape from her mother’s house, she did not desert her. Indeed, in Helen’s marriage Mrs. Longbow might truly have been said to have gained a son rather than to have lost a daughter. The Bradfords were ardent worshipers at the shrine, and they worshiped very publicly. In private, however, I detected a faint acidity of reference, a tinge of irony, that made me suspect them of harboring envious feelings. Perhaps they resented the luster of satellites, and would have liked to emulate Mrs. Longbow’s glow of assured fame. Helen never seemed to me a very good sort, though we were accounted friends. She had many of her mother’s most striking qualities.
Margaret, who was only a year older than Charles, never married. She was her mother’s secretary and a most devoted daughter. She received with her, traveled with her, labored for her without apparent repining. Whether she ever had time to think seriously of marrying, or of leaving her mother on other terms, always seemed to me doubtful. At all events, she said as much to me repeatedly when at the age of twenty-five I proposed to her. Without question, she had a great deal to do in helping Mrs. Longbow to transact efficiently the business of the universe. She was prettier than Helen, who grew large and stately by her thirtieth year and was of too bold and mustached an aquiline type for beauty. Margaret was fair, and retained the girlish lines of her slender figure until middle age. She was clever, too, like the rest of the family, and had seen much of the world in her mother’s company. She wrote stories that had considerable success, and she would have had personal distinction as a member of any other family. My only reason for suspecting that she sometimes wearied of her filial rôle was a remark that she once made to me when I complimented her on a pretty novel she had published.