The Whole Family by William Dean Howells

Author:William Dean Howells
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620112137
Publisher: Duke Classics

VIII - The Married Daughter — By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

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We start in life with the most preposterous of all human claims—that one should be understood. We get bravely over that after awhile; but not until the idea has been knocked out of us by the hardest. I used to worry a good deal, myself, because nobody—distinctly not one person—in our family understood me; that is, me in my relation to themselves; nothing else, of course, mattered so much. But that was before I was married. I think it was because Tom understood me from the very first eye-beam, that I loved him enough to marry him and learn to understand HIM. I always knew in my heart that he had the advantage of me in that beautiful art: I suppose one might call it the soul-art. At all events, it has been of the least possible consequence to me since I had Tom, whether any one else in the world understood me or not.

I suppose—in fact, I know—that it is this unfortunate affair of Peggy's which has brought up all that old soreness to the surface of me.

Nobody knows better than I that I have not been a popular member of this family. But nobody knows as well as I how hard I have tried to do my conscientious best by the whole of them, collectively and individually considered. An older sister, if she have any consciousness of responsibility at all, is, to my mind, not in an easy position. Her extra years give her an extra sense. One might call it a sixth sense of family anxiety which the younger children cannot share. She has, in a way, the intelligence and forethought of a mother without a mother's authority or privilege.

When father had that typhoid and could not sleep—dear father! in his normal condition he sleeps like a bag of corn-meal—who was there in all the house to keep those boys quiet? Nobody but me. When they organized a military company in our back yard directly under father's windows—two drums, a fish-horn, a jews-harp, a fife, and three tin pans—was there anybody but me to put a stop to it? It was on this occasion that the pet name Moolymaria, afterward corrupted into Messymaria, and finally evolved into Meddlymaria, became attached to me. To this day I do not like to think how many cries I had over it. Then when Charles Edward got into debt and nobody dared to tell father; and when Billy had the measles and there wasn't a throat in the house to read to him four hours a day except my unpopular throat; and when Charles Edward had that quarrel over a girl with a squash-colored dress and cerise hair-ribbons; or when Alice fell in love with an automobile, the chauffeur being incidentally thrown in, and took to riding around the country with him—who put a stop to it? Who was the only person in the family that COULD put a stop to it?

Then

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