Dearest Mother: I hope you
are coming home soon. I really think you should.
Aunt Lizzie is here and she brought two friends, and,
mother, I feel so responsible for them! Aunt
Lizzie is sane enough, if somewhat cranky; but Miss
Tish is almost more than I can manage—I
never know what she is going to do next—and
I am worn out with chaperoning her. And Miss
Aggie, although she is very sweet, is always smoking
cubeb cigarettes for hay fever, and it looks terrible!
The neighbors do not know they are cubeb, and, anyhow,
that’s a habit, mother. And yesterday Miss
Tish was arrested, and ran a motor race and won it,
and to-day she is knitting a stocking and reciting
the Twenty-third Psalm. Please, mother, I think
you should come home.
Lovingly, Bettina.
P.S. I think I shall marry Jasper
after all. He says he likes the
Presbyterian service.
I looked up from reading Eliza’s letter.
Tish was knitting quietly and planning to give the
money back to the town in the shape of a library,
and Aggie was holding a cubeb cigarette to her nose.
Down on the tennis court Jasper and Bettina were idly
batting a ball round.
“I’m glad the Ellis man did not get her,”
said Aggie. And then, after a sneeze, “How
Jasper reminds me of Mr. Wiggins.”
The library did not get the money after all.
Tish sent it, as a wedding present, to Bettina.
Aggie has always been in the habit of observing the
anniversary of Mr. Wiggins’s death. Aggie
has the anniversary habit, anyhow, and her life is
a succession: of small feast-days, on which she
wears mental crape or wedding garments—depending
on the occasion. Tish and I always remember these
occasions appropriately, sending flowers on the anniversaries
of the passing away of Aggie’s parents; grandparents;
a niece who died in birth; her cousin, Sarah Webb,
who married a missionary and was swallowed whole by
a large snake,—except her shoes, which the
reptile refused and of which Aggie possesses the right,
given her by the stricken husband; and, of course,
Mr. Wiggins.
For Mr. Wiggins Tish and I generally send the same
things each year—Tish a wreath of autumn
foliage and I a sheaf of wheat tied with a lavender
ribbon. The program seldom varies. We drive
to the cemetery in the afternoon and Aggie places
the sheaf and the wreath on Mr. Wiggins’s last
resting-place, after first removing the lavender ribbon,
of which she makes cap bows through the year and an
occasional pin-cushion or fancy-work bag; then home
to chicken and waffles, which had been Mr. Wiggins’s
favorite meal. In the evening Charlie Sands generally
comes in and we play a rubber or two of bridge.
On the thirtieth anniversary of Mr. Wiggins’s
falling off a roof and breaking his neck, Tish was
late in arriving, and I found Aggie sitting alone,
dressed in black, with a tissue-paper bundle in her
lap. I put my sheaf on the table and untied my
bonnet-strings.
