Miss Theodora/Chapter 17
XVII.
When the die was finally cast, Miss Theodora wisely kept to herself her disappointment at Ernest's change of plan. Her life thus far had accustomed her to disappointments. What a pang she had felt, for example, some years after leaving it, when she heard that the old family house on the hill had become a boarding house! How disturbed she had been, walking up Beacon Street one day, to see workmen tearing down one of the most dignified of the old purple-windowed houses, once the home of intimate friends of hers, to make way for an uglier if more ornate structure! What an intrusion she felt the car tracks to be which run through Charles Street across Beacon Street, connecting the South and the West Ends of the city! Miss Theodora's Boston was not so large but that it could be traversed by any healthy person on foot; and she agreed with Miss Chatterwits when she exclaimed, "What in the world has the West End to do with Roxbury Neck?"
Real trials, like Ernest's change of plan, Miss Theodora was able to bear with surprising equanimity. She had not even quailed when she made that discovery, hardest of all even for a sensible woman, that she was growing old. The first rude shock had come one day in a horse-car, when she heard an over-dressed young mother say to her little son in a loud whisper: "Give the old lady a seat." Before this Miss Theodora had certainly not thought of herself as old; but looking in the glass on her return home, she saw that the youth had vanished from her face. For though the over-dressed young mother might have said "oldish" more truly than "old," yet Miss Theodora realized that the change had come.
What it was she could scarcely define, save that there were now long lines on her cheek where once there had been curves, that her eyes were perhaps less bright, that gray hairs had begun to appear, and that certainly she had less color than formerly. All these changes had not come in a day, and yet in a day, in an hour, Miss Theodora realized them. As she looked in the mirror and saw that her gray hairs were still few enough to count, she glanced below the glass to the little faded photograph on the table. John had passed into the land of perpetual youth, and William, that other, had he begun to show the marks of age?
Thus she wondered as she gazed at the young man with the longish, thick hair, at which Ernest had sometimes laughed. But she seldom let her mind wander in this direction, and she turned it now toward other friends of her girlhood, of whom some occasionally flitted across her vision. The most of those who had been her contemporaries the winter she came out were now married. Of these, she could not recall one who had not "married well," as the phrase is. Were they growing old more gracefully than she? Would she change places with any one of those portly matrons, absorbed now in family or social interests? The sphere of the unmarried few was unattractive to her. The causes, whether literary or philanthropic, into which the majority threw themselves had certainly no charm for her. She could not have worked for the Indians after the manner of her cousin Sarah Somerset. To her the Indian race seemed too cruel for the enthusiasm lavished on it by a certain group of Boston women.
When her father had verged toward Transcendentalism she had lagged behind, and more modern "isms" were even farther out of her reach. She listened dubiously to rhapsodies by one of her cousins on the immense spiritual value of the Vedas. Woman suffrage! Well, she had only one friend who waxed eloquent over this, and Miss Theodora, although on the whole liberal-minded, was repelled from a study of the question by the peculiarities of dress and manner affected by some of its devotees. Even Culture itself, with a capital letter, and all that this implies could never have been a fad of hers. The books people talked about now were so different from those that she had been accustomed to; she knew nothing about modern French literature, and her friends cared nothing for Miss Ferrier or Crabbe. After all, Miss Theodora would not have changed places with one of these friends of her youth, married or unmarried, with their tablets covered with social engagements or note-books crammed with appointments for meetings or lectures. She found her own life sufficiently full.
That she was growing old brought her little worry, coming as it did at the same time with the change in Ernest's plans. Although she would have been very slow to admit it, Kate's thorough approval of Ernest's new career modified Miss Theodora's own view of it. Unconsciously she had begun to dream of a united fortune for Kate and Ernest; for in her eyes the two were perfectly adapted to each other.
"There's a prospect of your amounting to something now," she heard Kate say to Ernest one day. "You haven't been at all like yourself this winter, and I just believe that college would have ruined you," she continued frankly.
It was Kate who pointed out to Miss Theodora the perils that surrounded a young man who was not very much interested in his work at Cambridge.
"Well, of course you ought to know, for you have a brother in college."
"Oh, dear me, Ernest and Ralph aren't a bit alike. Ernest would always be different from Ralph, I should hope." For Kate and Ralph, since their childhood, had gone on very different paths.
"No, I'm not afraid of Ernest's growing like Ralph; but I know that Ernest is more easily influenced than you think, and it's a good thing that he's going to have studies that will interest him." All of which seemed to Miss Theodora to augur well for the plans which she had formed for these two young people.
To Ernest Kate spoke even more frankly than to his aunt. "I knew that you'd do it," she said, "and I feel almost sure that you'll make a great man, and really you will be able to help your aunt much sooner than if you began to study law. As soon as possible I want Cousin Theodora to have lots of money. She won't accept anything from me, and you have no idea how many things there are that she needs money for."
So Ernest, encouraged by the good opinion of the young woman he cared most for, made less than he might have made of the older woman's disappointment. He made less of it, perhaps, because, with the confidence of youth, he believed the time near when she would admit that he had done the very best thing for them both.