And a scene that beggars description met my eyes, as I stood in the living-room door. I hope this account I am going to try and write will get petrified by some kind of new element they will suddenly discover some day and the manuscript be dug up from the ruins of Glendale to interest the natives of the Argon age about 2800 A. D.
Sallie sat in the large armchair in the middle of the room weeping in the slow, regular way a woman has of starting out with tears, when she means to let them flow for hours, maybe days, and there were just five echoes to her grief, all done in different keys and characters.
Cousin Martha knelt beside the chair and held Sallie's head on her ample bosom, but I must say that the expression on her face was one of bewilderment, as well as of grief.
The three little Horton cousins sat close together in the middle of the old hair-cloth sofa by the window and were weeping as modestly and helplessly as they did everything else in life, while Mrs. Hargrove, in her chair under her son's portrait, was just plainly out and out howling.
And on the hearth-rug, before the tiny fire of oak chips that the old ladies liked to keep burning all summer, stood the master of the house and, for once in my life, I have seen the personification of masculine helplessness. He was a tragedy and I flew straight to him with arms wide open, which clasped both his shoulders as I gave him a good shake to arouse him from his paralyzation.
"What's the matter?" I demanded, with the second shake.
"I'm a brute, Evelina," he answered, and a sudden discouragement lined every feature of his beautiful biblical face. I couldn't stand that and I hugged him tight to my breast for an instant and then administered another earthquake shake.
"Tell me exactly what has happened," I demanded, looking straight into his tragic eyes and letting my hands slip from his shoulders down his arms until they held both of his hands tight and warm in mine.
Jane, I was glad that I had offered the cup of my eyes to him full of this curious inter-sex elixir of life that you have induced me to seek so blindly, for he responded to the dose immediately and the color came back into his face as he answered me just as sensibly as he would another man.