Chapter 1 The Father by William Dean HowellsChapter 2 The Old-maid Aunt by Mary E. Wilkins FreemanChapter 3 The Grandmother by Mary Heaton VorseChapter 4 The Daughter-in-law by Mary Stewart CuttingChapter 5 The School-girl by Elizabeth JordanChapter 6 The Son-in-law by John Kendrick BangsChapter 7 The Married Son by Henry JamesChapter 8 The Married Daughter by Elizabeth Stuart PhelpsChapter 9 The Mother by Edith WyattChapter 10 The School-boy by Mary Raymond Shipman AndrewsChapter 11 Peggy by Alice BrownChapter 12 The Friend Of The Family by Henry Van Dyke
As soon as we heard the pleasant news--I suppose the news of an
engagement ought always to be called pleasant--it was decided that I
ought to speak first about it, and speak to the father. We had not
been a great while in the neighborhood, and it would look less like a
bid for the familiar acquaintance of people living on a larger scale
than ourselves, and less of an opening for our own intimacy if they
turned out to be not quite so desirable in other ways as they were in
the worldly way. For the ladies of the respective families first to
offer and receive congratulations would be very much more committing
on both sides; at the same time, to avoid the appearance of stiffness,
some one ought to speak, and speak promptly. The news had not come to
us directly from our neighbors, but authoritatively from a friend of
theirs, who was also a friend of ours, and we could not very well hold
back. So, in the cool of the early evening, when I had quite finished
rasping my lawn with the new mower, I left it at the end of the swath,
which had brought me near the fence, and said across it,
"Good-evening!"
My neighbor turned from making his man pour a pail of water on the
earth round a freshly planted tree, and said, "Oh, good-evening! How
d'ye do? Glad to see you!" and offered his hand over the low coping so
cordially that I felt warranted in holding it a moment.
"I hope it's in order for me to say how very much my wife and I are
interested in the news we've heard about one of your daughters? May I
offer our best wishes for her happiness?"
"Oh, thank you," my neighbor said. "You're very good indeed. Yes,
it's rather exciting--for us. I guess that's all for to-night, Al," he
said, in dismissal of his man, before turning to lay his arms
comfortably on the fence top. Then he laughed, before he added, to me,
"And rather surprising, too."
"Those things are always rather surprising, aren't they?" I
suggested.
"Well, yes, I suppose they are. It oughtn't be so in our case,
though, as we've been through it twice before: once with my son--he
oughtn't to have counted, but he did--and once with my eldest
daughter. Yes, you might say you never do quite expect it, though
everybody else does. Then, in this case, she was the baby so long,
that we always thought of her as a little girl. Yes, she's kept on
being the pet, I guess, and we couldn't realize what was in the air."
I had thought, from the first sight of him, that there was
something very charming in my neighbor's looks. He had a large, round
head, which had once been red, but was now a russet silvered, and was
not too large for his manly frame, swaying amply outward, but not too
amply, at the girth. He had blue, kind eyes, and a face fully
freckled, and the girl he was speaking of with a tenderness in his
tones rather than his words, was a young feminine copy of him; only,
her head was little, under its load of red hair, and her figure, which
we had lately noticed flitting in and out, as with a shy consciousness
of being stared at on account of her engagement, was as light as his
was heavy on its feet.
I said, "Naturally," and he seemed glad of the chance to laugh
again.
"Well, of course! And her being away at school made it all the more
so. If we'd had her under our eye, here--Well, we shouldn't have had
her under our eye if she had BEEN here; or if we had, we shouldn't
have seen what was going on; at least /I/ shouldn't; maybe her
mother would. So it's just as well it happened as it did happen, I
guess. We shouldn't have been any the wiser if we'd known all about
it." I joined him in his laugh at his paradox, and he began again.
"What's that about being the unexpected that happens? I guess what
happens is what ought to have been expected. We might have known when
we let her go to a coeducational college that we were taking a risk of
losing her; but we lost our other daughter that way, and SHE never
went to ANY kind of college. I guess we counted the chances before we
let her go. What's the use? Of course we did, and I remember saying to
my wife, who's more anxious than I am about most things--women are, I
guess--that if the worst came to the worst, it might not be such a bad
thing. I always thought it wasn't such an objectionable feature, in
the coeducational system, if the young people did get acquainted under
it, and maybe so well acquainted that they didn't want to part enemies
in the end. I said to my wife that I didn't see how, if a girl was
going to get married, she could have a better basis than knowing the
fellow through three or four years' hard work together. When you think
of the sort of hit-or-miss affairs most marriages are that young
people make after a few parties and picnics, coeducation as a
preliminary to domestic happiness doesn't seem a bad notion."
"There's something in what you say," I assented.
"Of course there is," my neighbor insisted. "I couldn't help
laughing, though," and he laughed, as if to show how helpless he had
been, "at what my wife said. She said she guessed if it came to that
they would get to know more of each other's looks than they did of
their minds. She had me there, but I don't think my girl has made out
so very poorly even as far as books are concerned."
Upon this invitation to praise her, I ventured to say, "A young
lady of Miss Talbert's looks doesn't need much help from books."
I could see that what I had said pleased him to the core, though he
put on a frown of disclaimer in replying, "I don't know about her
looks. She's a GOOD girl, though, and that's the main thing, I guess."
"For her father, yes, but other people don't mind her being
pretty," I persisted. "My wife says when Miss Talbert comes out into
the garden, the other flowers have no chance."
"Good for Mrs. Temple!" my neighbor shouted, joyously giving
himself away.
I have always noticed that when you praise a girl's beauty to her
father, though he makes a point of turning it off in the direction of
her goodness, he likes so well to believe she is pretty that he cannot
hold out against any persistence in the admirer of her beauty. My
neighbor now said with the effect of tasting a peculiar sweetness in
my words, "I guess I shall have to tell my wife, that." Then he added,
with a rush of hospitality, "Won't you come in and tell her yourself?"
"Not now, thank you. It's about our tea-time."
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