15
_COPE ENTERTAINS SEVERAL LADIES_
Cope's excuse, involving the expected visit of a relative, may not have
been altogether sincere, but it received, within a week or so, the
substantial backing of actuality: a relative came. She was an aunt,--his
father's sister,--and she came at the suggestion of a concerned landlady.
This person, made anxious by a languid young man who had begged off from
his classes and who was likely to need more attention than her scanty
margin of leisure could grant, had even suggested a hospital while yet it
was easy for him to reach one. Though Cope meant to leave her soon, it did
not suit him to leave her quite as soon as this; and so Aunt Harriet came
in from Freeford to look the situation over and to lend a hand if need be.
She spent two nights in a vacant chamber at transient rates; was grudgingly
allowed to prepare his "slops," as he called them, in the kitchen; and had
time to satisfy herself that, after all, nothing very serious was the
matter.
Randolph did not meet this relative, but he heard about her; and her
coming, as a sort of family representative, helped him still further in his
picture of the _res angusta_ of a small-town household: a father held
closely to office or warehouse--his own or some one else's; a sister
confined to her school-room; a mother who found the demands of the domestic
routine too exacting even to allow a three-hour trip to town; and a
brother--Randolph added this figure quite gratuitously out of an active
imagination and a determined desire not to put any of the circle to the
test of a personal encounter--and a brother who was perhaps off somewhere
"on the road.
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