“Delightful, nothing!  But Al Bennett is a man of sense not to marry any of the string of women I suppose he’s got following him!” she said.  Miss Chester looked at her in a mild kind of wonder, but she went on murdering Mr. Johnson’s shirt-sleeve with the needle without noticing the glance at all.

“Well, well, honey, I don’t know about that,” said Aunt Bettie as she fanned and rocked her great, big, darling, fat self in the strong rocker I always kept in the breezy angle of the porch for her.  “Al is not old enough to have proved himself entirely, and from what I hear—­” she paused with the big hearty smile that she always wears when she begins to tease or match-make, and she does them both most of her time.

But at whom do you suppose she looked?  Not me!  Miss Chester!  That was cold tub number two for that day, and I didn’t react as quickly as I might, but when I did I was in the proper glow all over.  When I revived and saw the lovely pale blush on her face I felt like a cabbage-rose beside a tea-bud.  I was glad Aunt Adeline came out on the porch just then so I could go in and tell Judy to bring out the iced tea and cakes.  When I came from the kitchen I stepped into my room and took out one of Alfred’s letters from the desk drawer and opened it at random, as you do the Bible when you want to decide things, and put my finger down on a line with my eyes shut This was what it was: 

  “—­and all these years I have walked the world, blindfolded to its
  loveliness with the blackness that came to me when I found that you—­”

I didn’t read any more, but shoved it back in a hurry and went on out on the porch, comforted in a way, but feeling some more in sympathy with Mrs Johnson than I had before Aunt Bettie and her guest from Washington had interrupted our algebraic demonstration on the man subject.  You can’t always be sure of the right answer to X in any proposition of life; that is, a woman can’t!

And, furthermore, I didn’t like that next hour much, just as a sample of life, for instance.  Aunt Bettie had got her joining-together humor well started, and right there before my face she made a present of every nice man in Hillsboro to that lovely, distinguished, strange girl who could have slipped through a bucket hoop if she had tried hard.  I had to sit there, listen to the presentations, watch her drink two tall delicious glasses of tea full of sugar and consume without fear three of Judy’s puffy cakes, while I crumbled mine in secret over the banisters and set half the glass of tea out of sight behind the wistaria vine.

It was bad enough to hear Aunt Bettie just offer her Tom, who, if he is her own son, is my favorite cousin, but I believe the worst minute I almost ever faced was when she began on the judge, for I could see from Aunt Adeline’s shoulder beyond Miss Chester how she was enjoying that, and she added another distinguished ancestor to his pedigree every time Aunt Bettie paused for breath.  I couldn’t say a word about the fish and Aunt Adeline wouldn’t!  I almost loved Mrs. Johnson when she bit off a thread viciously and said, “Humph,” as she rose to start the tea-party home.