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THE WHOLE FAMILY
CONTENTS
I. The Father by William Dean Howells
II. The Old-Maid Aunt by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
III. The Grandmother by Mary Heaton Vorse
IV. The Daughter-in-Law by Mary Stewart Cutting
V. The School-Girl by Elizabeth Jordan
VI. The Son-in-Law by John Kendrick Bangs
VII. The Married Son by Henry James
VIII.The Married Daughter by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
IX. The Mother by Edith Wyatt
X. The School-Boy by Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
XI. Peggy by Alice Brown
XII. The Friend of the Family by Henry Van Dyke
THE WHOLE FAMILY
I. THE FATHER
by William Dean Howells
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
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