The Whole Family: a Novel by Twelve AuthorsHowells, William Dean
General
The Whole Family: a Novel by Twelve Authors
Howells, William Dean
Domestic fiction
The two youngest children, or the fall chickens as they are called in
recognition of the wide interval between their ages and those of the
other children, are probably of the indeterminate character proper to
their years. We think the girl rather inclines to a hauteur based upon
the general neglect of that quality in the family, where even the
eldest sister is too much engaged in ruling to have much force left for
snubbing. The child carries herself with a vague loftiness, which has
apparently not awaited the moment of long skirts for keeping pretenders
to her favor at a distance. In the default of other impertinents to
keep in abeyance we fancy that she exercises her gift upon her younger
brother, who, so far as we have been able to note, is of a disposition
which would be entirely sweet if it were not for the exasperations he
suffers from her. I like to put myself in his place, and to hold that
he believes himself a better judge than she of the sort of companions he
chooses, she being disabled by the mental constitution of her sex, and
the defects of a girl's training, from knowing the rare quality of boys
who present themselves even to my friendly eyes as dirty, and, when not
patched, ragged. I please myself in my guesses at her character with the
conjecture that she is not satisfied with her sister's engagement to a
fellow-student in a co-educational college, who is looking forward to a
professorship.
In spite of her injustice in regard to his own companions, this
imaginable attitude of hers impresses the boy, if I understand boys. I
have no doubt he reasons that she must be right about something, and as
she is never right about boys, she must be right about brothers-in-law,
potential if not actual. This one may be, for all the boy knows, a
sissy; he inclines to believe, from what he understands of the matter,
that he is indeed a sissy, or he would never have gone to a college
where half the students are girls. He himself, as I have heard, intends
to go to a college, but whether Harvard, or Bryant's Business College,
he has not yet decided. One thing he does know, though, and that is
there are not going to be any girls in it. We have not allowed our
invention so great play in regard to the elder members of our neighbor's
family perhaps because we really know something more about them. Mrs.
Talbert duly called after We came to Eastridge, and when my wife had
self-respectfully waited a proper time, which she made a little more
than a week lest she should feel that she had been too eager for the
acquaintance, she returned the call. Then she met not only Mrs. Talbert,
but Mrs. Talbert's mother, who lives with them, in an anxiety for their
health which would impair her own if she were not of a constitution
such as you do not find in these days of unladylike athletics. She was
inclined to be rather strict with my wife about her own health, and mine
too, and told her she must be careful not to let me work too hard, or
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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