Chapter 22

Miss Theodora watered the morning-glories in the little yard behind the house with sighs, if not with tears. It was a poor little garden, this spot of greenery in the desert of back yards on which her windows looked. The flowers which she cultivated were neither many nor rare. Nasturtiums, sweet peas and morning-glories were dexterously trained to hide the ugliness of the bare brown fence. She had a number of hardy geraniums and a few low-growing things between the geraniums and the border of mignonette which edged the long, narrow garden bed. In one corner of the yard there was the dead trunk of a pear tree, whose crookedness Miss Theodora had tried to hide by trying to make a quick-growing vine climb over it. Curiously enough, all these attempts had been unsuccessful, and Ernest, commenting thereon, had said, laughingly:

“Why, yes, Aunt Theodora, that stump is so ugly that not even the kitten will climb over it.”

Nevertheless, there had been a time when the tree was full of leaves, and Miss Theodora, glancing at it now, a month after her nephew’s departure, sighed, as she recalled how Ernest and Kate had loved to sit in its shade. Sometimes they had played shop there, when Ernest was always the clerk and Kate the buyer; but more often they had sat quietly on warm spring afternoons, while Ernest read and Kate cut out paper dolls from the fashion plates of an old magazine. Indeed, there were few things in the house or out of it that did not remind Miss Theodora of these two young people. How could she bear it, then, that their paths were to lie entirely apart?

Did Kate feel aggrieved at Ernest’s attachment to “that girl,” as Miss Theodora always characterized Eugenie? She wondered if she herself had been too stern in her attitude toward Ernest’s love affair. She had not been severe with Ernest, —she deserved credit for that, she said to herself, —yet she recalled with a pang his expression of dismay when she had said, “Really, Ernest, you cannot expect me to call on Miss—Miss Kurtz; at least, not at present.”

She had excused herself by reflecting that he was not old enough to decide in a matter of this kind. It was very different from letting him choose his own profession, —though she was beginning to think that even in this matter she had made a mistake. If he had stayed at Cambridge he might never have met Eugenie Kurtz.

She had yielded to Ernest in the former case largely from a belief, founded on many years’ observation, that half the unhappiness of middle life comes from the wrong choice of a career. She had seen men of the student temperament ground down to business, and regretting the early days when they might have started on a different path. She had noticed lawyers and clergymen who were better fitted to sell goods over a counter, and she had begun to think that medicine was the only profession which put the right man in the right place. This had influenced her in letting Ernest choose his own career.