Winifred Cotter

“ But now I could no longer veil the horrid fact that Charlotte, The Good, the envy of my friends, the boasted treasure of our household, was beginning to ravel out and run down like any ordinary, native-born, garden-variety of maid. It was difficult to adjust myself to such an unwelcome truth. I had leaned so long and so comfortably upon her virtues that life had begun to broaden out before me like a primrose path somewhat as it had before I took up housekeeping at all. ”

“ MRS. MONTROSE
SHE rose as I entered the room and remained standing until I asked her to be seated.
It certainly conduces to self-respect to be treated like a lady. I felt myself instinctively assuming a gentler manner as I crossed the room, at the same time marshaling to my aid such remnants of dignity as my long association with people of the "Good-as-you-or-better type" have left to me.
When I snapped on the light and saw her face I was almost startled. It was of a pure Madonna type, with soft, dark eyes, and lines of settled and perfect composure. ”

“ It was no time to explain her preference for crackers or request the onlookers to stroke her head. Allowances must be made of course for the exigencies of a limited vocabulary, but it did seem to be carrying things too far for that irate fowl to stand up to her full height, red anger riding her like a hag, and call in a gentle, high-pitched voice "Kitty, Kitty, Kitty," while the object of her adjurations lurked below waiting an opportune moment in which to scratch out a clawful of feathers.
Polly is no more. ”

“ Catherine is plain Canadian. She was born on a farm in Ontario, and has a disposition to regard milk, butter and eggs as staples of diet instead of luxurious accessories. She has a conservative mind toward new ideas. They seem to her superfluous and peace-disturbing. She loves the settled track, the well-worn ruts of dailiness. She resented the introduction of the fireless-cooker, and looked upon the electric-washer as an unnecessary and dangerous complication to life. She is inhospitable to any delicately-veiled allusions to the duty of Canadian kitchens in time of war. ”

“ Of course one never really looks at a furnace man. It would seem almost indelicate to do so, as if he were an individual, instead of a part of the landscape, an accessory, like the hose or garbage tins, necessary conveniences which one instinctively ignores. But you can hardly help looking at Williams, once you realize him at all. He is such an anomaly, such a conspicious example of Nature's misplaced confidences. ”

“ I spoke firmly and directly, but as kindly as I could, and ended by saying cheerfully, "Now, Charlotte, suppose you go on with your usual duties for the present. Think it all over not so much from the point of whether you go or stay, but whether you are giving as good and faithful service as it is in your power to give, and becoming as good a woman as it is in you to be."
Charlotte went silently out and I sat on in the gathering dusk with a touch of that glow in the heart which comes when for the moment we put personal interests aside, and let fundamentals surge up and speak for themselves. ”

“ When our impedimenta were all collected and unroped on the cottage veranda, and the little steamer that brought us had wobbled off over the clear lake again, looking for all the world like some huge, clumsy, water-beetle, Abel and I settled down to accounts out on the pine-shaded, balsam-scented side veranda, I with my hat still on, Abel in his honest gingham shirt-sleeves.
It always takes time for Abel to tell things. There has to be a starter, in the way of a few general observations, and a gradual leading up to the main point. There is nothing to be gained by trying to hurry him. ”

“ I like to dwell upon that last picture of Lizzie with her little scrawny neck encircled by dimpled arms, and shy baby eyes peering around it at the strange lady. It was an assuaging interlude in the long list of denials life had dealt out to her, a green and tender blade springing in the bleak garden of her experience.
Then there was Bleason, the elusive, the capable, the inscrutable. She merits a whole chapter to herself. ”

“ THERE are some joys we may as well be prepared to resign with our youth. Being alone in the house is one of them. Such an intoxication of sudden expansion and freedom used to come over me on those rare occasions when I was left in possession of the house, that I recall it as one of the most subtle and delicious experiences of my childhood. The consciousness of hidden fullness in the cupboards, and labeled stores in the cellar; of bottled sweetness and mulled ravishments, almost oppressed me with its vividness. ”

“ I noticed that Catherine went less often to the front hall to consult it by way of checking her own erratic kitchen clock, while other parts of its anatomy had followed the bird and its song to the ignominy of the tool-box. To me, there was something almost profane in this uncovering of the hidden things of—no, not nature, but mechanical devices. I am one who prefers to let well alone. ”

“ I soared in the reflected glory of Adelina's capability.
Of course, there were times when I felt uneasy it could hardly be otherwise. Periodic visitations to the larder I found were neither expected nor desired. I reasoned with myself. It is merely "interrupted habit," I said severely, "and a sign of on-coming age. You are growing inelastic. Accept the good the gods provide, and show yourself worthy of them." ”

“ Ingrained nature and habit combined are too strong for him, and in another round or two of the clock, we are back at the same old pace, drafts low, furnace clogged, rooms chilly. The path of least resistance (which is a well-beaten one for modern housekeepers) is to work on Janet's feelings, or go down myself, in the absence of pater familias, who nearly always is absent, of course, after his kind.
On Sundays Williams is a changed being. He wears a leisurely, not to say absent air, an approximation to cleanliness and a carnation in his buttonhole. ”

“ I own to gloomy forebodings. Matrimony is such a lottery at the best, and Abel wore so little the aspect of a prize. But I had the decency to look cheerful at any rate and to throw some effect of heartiness into the congratulations which were his due.
As soon as appeared to me seemly, I took the canoe and hastened around the hemlock-fringed bay to the little green house on the point, flanked in the rear by a disproportionately sized barn, and gay in front with straggly rose-bushes just making ready to bloom. ”

“ The ideal place for Catherine would be one where there were children a-plenty, hearty roystering ways and the daily ups and downs of busy, brimming family-life. She needs to be teased and depended on. She has a vast capacity for being depended on. It gets but little exercise in our staid, over-intellectualized household, where there are no incontinent appetites to be appeased at unlawful hours, nobody to "track in" and be apologetic and forgiven.
Catherine has not profited by Browning's high advice. Care does not irk her or doubt fret. No welcomed rebuff turns earth's smoothness rough to her. ”

“ How far should experience and age give way before the triumphant advance of confident youth? In short, how far should I give in to Adelina? If she hadn't been superior, of course, the matter would be simplified. But she was superior (in certain respects) and she knew it. What she didn't know, and what complicated the situation (it generally is what people don't know that complicates the situation) was that there is such a thing as reflex action; that her advance necessitated my retreat, her strengthening in a realm that didn't belong to her, my relative weakening. It's a very complex world. ”

“ Privately, I believe most people have a sneaking fondness for cuckoo-clocks. It is a relic of childhood's unsatisfied longings, and the misspent enthusiasms which, after all, makes good capital on which to begin grown-up days. It is what we yearned for and never possessed that lingers with sweetest effulgence in the memory, and who among us never yearned for a cuckoo-clock? ”

“ Keddo had won his place for himself chiefly by his confidence in it, and in our intentions toward him. Every self-respecting dog has "folks" back of him as a matter of course, somebody to love and belong to, his attitude seemed to say; we were his, and that was the sum of the matter. The tie was further strengthened by his absolute joy in it and his spontaneous devotion to us singly and collectively. None but a Prussian could have resisted him. Everybody liked him, everybody made friends with him. The very passers-by on the street (after his advent in Toronto) stopped to point him out. ”

“ A TOUCH of wistful warmth comes to my heart when I think of Sheila, blue-eyed, bright-haired, Irish Sheila, flushed with the adventure of foreign travel, and all unapprised of the toils that wait in Canadian kitchens to take the feet of the unwary immigrant. ”

“ It all really depends, of course, on how old you are, and since we have given up going by calendar count, that is difficult to determine. We can make a guess at other people's ages, but scarcely at our own because we feel so many different ages all at one and the same time.
It was Adelina who drove me to these reflections. It was she, indeed, who first brought home to me the horrid suspicion that I might unconsciously be drifting behind the times, not to say graying about the temples of my mind, Adelina was herself so very modern, so very capable. ”

“ Almost always we have to fall back upon second choices, second chances. It is so with Catherine. The more vital relationships for which she has abundant capacity, she knows only vicariously. The wandering tendrils of an affectionate nature, prohibited natural outlet, seek some touch upon reality in the experience of others. So it comes that I deal gently with Catherine's speculation upon the neighbors, her predilection for rice-pudding, and even with her fixed idea that cheese is a basic supply for supper. ”

“ Regrets don't do much good in this world, but it would be a stony heart that was without them where Laundry Ladies are concerned.
It was some satisfaction to me to know that before Mrs. Porter entirely disappeared from the horizon, others, more influential than I, or more leisured, or both, had espoused her cause in a practical way that eliminated from my consciousness the peace-destroying pictures of two cold, and hungry babes locked in with desolation while their mother did my washing for what had never before seemed so much like a pittance. ”

“ And not the least of the blessings (albeit an unconscious one) that flow from his elemental view of life, is Abel's own belief in human kindliness. I will not maintain that his outer and material welfare is advanced thereby. It is not given to all to believe in or rely upon elemental honesty. We are so habituated, most of us, to the money-suckers, that we insensibly assume an attitude of defense, forgetting that some simple natures remain human and honest to the end. ”

“ Then one day, going into the kitchen, I became aware of an unwonted and self-conscious silence there. Sheila looked like a drooping flower. Her face was kept studiously away from me. I knew the hour had come and I quailed before it. I wonder if other women are such cowards in their kitchens as I am in mine; if they feel, as I do, the delicacies of the situation, the injustices it engenders, the necessary reserves? Personal service involves personal relations between strangers. ”

“ For myself, I have always liked Nature's way of bestowing her benefactions, unassorted. I like the big and little basketed together under the parent tree, and not hand-picked over with an eye to commercial values as they come on the vendor's stall. It takes off something, a sense of friendliness, to see them formally laid out in graduated rows. For the same reason I liked Abel. ”

“ Once an idea could be introduced into the active little brain, it was instantly seized and applied. As when he learned that one gave the right paw, never the left, in a hand-shake. Two minutes sufficed for this important fact to be made his own, and it was never forgotten, but for the most part there were no symbols by which to convey the idea.
It is hard to realize what a flood of light upon our own complex motives and impulses elementary intelligences can impart. It is almost startling. In Keddo's artless ways, one got a glimmer of inflections operative much higher up the scale. ”

“ Superior virtue often does have a depressing effect, particularly when coupled, as it was in Adelina's case, with an invincible, though restrained, consciousness of the same. Situations you can explain are never quite so hard to bear as those you suffer in an atmosphere of delicately-tempered, but subtly reproachful silence.
Adelina had no faults and revealed no lapses—except the grammatical ones before alluded to, which, of course, had no humbling virtue, since she wasn't aware of them. ”