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Don't leave us, Ariel! Maker of music, bringer of blossoms, stay!" Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, with an uplift of his fine black brows and a satirical smile, once diagnosed the case of Great-Aunt Sophronisba Scarlett as "congenital Hyndsitis"; Doctor Richard Geddes said you'd only to take a glance at her house to see that she was predestined to be damned.
"Bad lot, Sophronisba. Very bad!" "Mrs. Scarlett," I reminded him gently, "was my relative only by marriage." "Cousin of mine; mother's relative. Not on speaking-, only on fighting-terms," he interjected. I remembered what Uncle Adam had told us; and I'm afraid I eyed him a bit harder than politeness warranted.
You should have been here with Great-Aunt Sophronisba," Alicia told him, tartly. "You'd have been ideal companions, both of you beware-of-the-doggy, hair-trigger-tempery, all-to-your-selfish." The Author gasped, and rubbed his eyes. Never, never, in all his pampered life, had one so spoken to him. "Why, of all the cheek!" exploded The Author.
Schmetz fell to praying aloud. But he couldn't remember anything save the grace before meat, so he prayed that, in a sonorous voice. For he is a pious man. The doctor's nose wrinkled and his lips stretched: "Sophronisba!" he hissed, and, having hurled this hand-grenade, scuttled down the ladder like a boy of ten. Alicia sank upon the ground and rocked to and fro.
Great Aunt Sophronisba was my aunt not by blood but by marriage; she having, when she was no longer what is known as a spring chicken, met my Great-Uncle Johnny Scarlett and scandalized all Hyndsville by marrying him out of hand.
One wonders what the bride was like, whom he commends for "Housekeeping Virtues, so that the Servants instantly Obey, there is no Pilfering & Loitering, & the House moves like Clockwork." He must have been like clockwork, himself. There seems less and less human emotion in him. The birth of his only child gets this: "This day was born Sophronisba Harriott Hynds, nam'd for her Estimable Mother.
Peal upon peal, like silver bells, irrepressibly, infectiously, irresistibly, Alicia laughed. She cries with her eyes open and her mouth shut, and she laughs with her eyes shut and her mouth open. The effect is beyond all words enchanting. The doctor paused in his headlong flight. "All right: laugh!" he said, darkly. "But I shall warn Jelnik, none the less!" And muttering: "Sophronisba!
Then, raising his voice to a sudden bellow, "Boy!" He handed the drawing to a boy, gave a few brief orders, and turned back to Fanny. "To-morrow morning every other paper in New York will have pictures showing Mildred Inness, the beauty, on her snow-white charger, or Sophronisba A. Bannister, A.B., Ph.D., in her cap and gown, or Mrs. William Van der Welt as Liberty.
I fancy that the Witch of Endor's neighbors must have had just such an opinion of her as these Hyndsville folk had of Great-Aunt Sophronisba. South Carolina people always talk in terms of three generations. When they say something about you, they remember something about your mother or your grandfather at the same time, and they tell that, too.
I decidedly approve of a beard!" "If his miserable hens come over here, I shall most certainly " "Keep the eggs. We'll tell him so when he comes again." "Comes again? What, and my name Sophronisba?" "My own grandmother had the second sight; and I don't need spectacles," said Alicia. "Sophy, that man has come into our lives to stay. I feel it in my bones!
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