For instance, years ago, when my best lamp of life went out, so to speak, I lit all my candles and kept my path.  I took just as much pains with my hair and my dress, and if I was unhappy I kept it out of evidence on my face.  I let my heart ache and bleed, but I would have died before I wrinkled my forehead and dimmed my eyes with tears and let everybody else know.  That was about the time when I met Ned Temple, and he fell so madly in love with me, and threatened to shoot himself if I would not marry him.  He did not.  Most men do not.  I wonder if he placed me when he heard of my anticipated coming.  Probably he did not.  They have probably alluded to me as dear old Aunt Elizabeth, and when he met me (I was staying at Harriet Munroe’s before she was married) nobody called me Elizabeth, but Lily.  Miss Elizabeth Talbert, instead of Lily Talbert, might naturally set him wrong.  Everybody here calls me Elizabeth.  Outside Eastridge I am Lily.  I dare say Ned Temple has not dreamed who I am.  I hear that he is quite brilliant, although the poor fellow must be limited as to his income.  However, in some respects it must be just as well.  It would be a great trial to a man with a large income to have a wife like Mrs. Temple, who could make no good use of it.  You might load that poor soul with crown jewels and she would make them look as if she had bought them at a department store for ninety-eight cents.  And the way she keeps her house must be maddening, I should think, to a brilliant man.  Fancy the books on the table being all arranged with the large ones under the small ones in perfectly even piles!  I am sure that he has his meals on time, and I am equally sure that the principal dishes are preserves and hot biscuits and cake.  That sort of diet simply shows forth in Mrs. Temple and her children.  I am sure that his socks are always mended, but I know that he always wipes his feet before he enters the house, that it has become a matter of conscience with him; and those exactions are to me pathetic.  These reflections are uncommonly like the popular conception as to how an old-maid aunt should reflect, had she not ceased to exist.  Sometimes I wish she were still existing and that I carried out her character to the full.  I am not at all sure but she, as she once was, coming here, would not have brought more happiness than I have.  I must say I thought so when I saw poor Harry Goward turn so pale when he first saw me after my arrival.  Why, in the name of common-sense, Ada, my sister-in-law, when she wrote to me at the Pollards’, announcing Peggy’s engagement, could not have mentioned who the man was, I cannot see.