ce of her mother. Older if not shrewder
observers than ourselves declared that what went in that house was what
Mrs. Talbert said, and that it went all the more effectively because
what she said Talbert said too.

That might have been because she said so little. When her mother left
the room she let a silence follow in which she seemed too embarrassed
to speak for a while on finding herself alone with my wife, and my wife
decided that the shyness of the girl whose engagement was soon afterward
reported, as well as the easy-goingness of the eldest son, had come from
their mother. As soon as Mrs. Talbert could command herself, she began
to talk, and every word she said was full of sense, with a little gust
of humor in the sense which was perfectly charming. Absolutely unworldly
as she was, she had very good manners; in her evasive way she was
certainly qualified to be the leader of society in Eastridge, and
socially Eastridge thought fairly well of itself. She did not obviously
pretend to so much literature as her mother, but she showed an even
nicer intelligence of our own situation in Eastridge. She spoke with a
quiet appreciation of the improvement in the Banner, which, although she
quoted Mr. Talbert, seemed to be the result of her personal acquaintance
with the paper in the past as well as the present. My wife pronounced
her the ideal mother of a family, and just what the wife of such a
man as Cyrus Talbert ought to be, but no doubt because Mrs. Talbert's
characteristics were not so salient as her mother's, my wife was less
definitely descriptive of her.

From time to time, it seemed that there was a sister of Mr. Talbert's
who visited in the family, but was now away on one of the many other
visits in which she passed her life. She was always going or coming
somewhere, but at the moment she was gone. My wife inferred from the
generation to which her brother belonged that she had long been a lady
of that age when ladies begin to be spoken of as maiden. Mrs. Talbert
spoke of her as if they were better friends than sisters-in-law are apt
to be, and said that she was to be with them soon, and she would
bring her with her when she returned my wife's call. From the general
impression in Eastridge we gathered that Miss Talbert was not without
the disappointment which endears maiden ladies to the imagination, but
the disappointment was of a date so remote that it was only matter of
pathetic hearsay, now. Miss Talbert, in he