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Updated: May 15, 2025
The Miss Linnets were in that temperate zone of old-maidism, when a woman will not say but that if a man of suitable years and character were to offer himself, she might be induced to tread the remainder of life's vale in company with him; Miss Pratt was in that arctic region where a woman is confident that at no time of life would she have consented to give up her liberty, and that she has never seen the man whom she would engage to honour and obey.
Nothing but solitary old-maidism, unless two of you happen to be sisters, for who else will join her shame to yours? Dreams, dreams, only dreams of the dearest thing that ever comes into a woman's arms and then you awake and there is no one there.
She was very aggravating in this way. Sometimes she would even take a pencil or pen and a sheet of paper for old Blinky, and reproduce it. She could not draw, of course, for she was not a painter; all she could do was to make anything look almost just like it was. There was one thing about her which excited much talk; I suppose it was only a piece of old-maidism. Of course she was religious.
This, of course, was going too far, and it created considerable excitement in the family, and led to some very serious talk being given her, in which the second commandment figured largely. It was considered as carrying old-maidism to an extreme length. For some time afterward she was rather discountenanced.
"It's nothing but a chronic case of old-maidism," said father impatiently. Things were very dull for a week. We saw no more of Mr. Malcolm MacPherson and we missed him dreadfully. Aunt Olivia was inscrutable, and worked with fierceness at superfluous tasks. One evening father came home with some news. "Malcolm MacPherson is leaving on the 7:30 train for the west," he said.
"Oh! no one can be miserable that is well married," cried Maria; "Heigho! the idea of old-maidism is too shocking to think about!" "Why does not Mr. Delafield get married, then, if marriage be so very desirable?" said Miss Henly, smiling at the customary rattle of her companion: "he can easily get a wife, you say?" "It is the difficulty of choosing there are so many attentive to him " "Maria!"
"As woman stands now in the estimate of man, her chances for happiness are almost wholly on the side of old-maidism. Still, freedom is the price of struggle and combat; and woman will first have to show, in actual strife, that she is the equal of her present lord." "Then you would turn every home into a battlefield?" said Mrs. Emerson.
There was, indeed, a danger his seniors said so of his developing into a regular "Auntie Fuss" of an adjutant, and when an officer once takes to old-maidism there is more hope for the virgin of seventy than for him.
Well, you see it was not to be: she had grown affrighted, I suppose, at the thought of all that weary life with only me, and has married a man who outrages all her delicate instincts and traditions of an accordant husband. But why speak of him? He supports her, and she has escaped the obloquy of old-maidism. She has married a maintenance. She says she loves him, so of course she does.
I thought that her desire for marriage in the abstract would outweigh the disadvantages of the concrete. But one can never reckon with real, bred-in-the-bone old-maidism. One morning Mr. Malcolm MacPherson told us all that he was coming up that evening to make Aunt Olivia set the day.
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