Rensselaer Journal, Volume 11, Number 14, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 September 1901 — NANNIE’S CAREER. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

NANNIE’S CAREER.

By VIOLA ROSEBORO'.

tCopyright. 1830. by The Century company.] it is now a year since I made my last visit to Tennessee, and I had then been away four years. During the Interval Strathboro had come over to the new south! I waa surprised and, it must be confessed, not wholly pleased. 1 had always supposed that Strathboro would l>e the last place to come under modern influences. There Is no chance for it to become commercial, and since the war It has droned along like a town In a dream. On this last visit 1 spent most of my time with M. . Caldwell, a cousin of my mother. WRj 1 1 itered her dear, big, diugy old house by ay of Its absurd, majestic, wooden pilla/ed portico and passed Into its wide, dun hall, I was vaguely conscious of Innovation In the air, and when I reached the guest chamber, to which I was at once conducted, it burst upon me. Here was the new south lu the unexpected form of berlbboned tidies, bits of draperies, things Kensington stitched, and a fancy crocheted rug lay on the foot of the great old canopied bedstead. I was glad tney had not got rid of the bedstead. It had satisfled my earliest ideas of splendor. I looked about me In sorrow, for all this array of fashionable fripperies seemed as foreign and out of place in Strathboro as it would be on a Mexican hacienda. “I see, Adeline, you are noticing my new things," said Mrs. Caldwell. "I suppose you see a great deal handsomer In New York, but when I was on to the meeting of the W. C. T. U. In Minneapolis I saw how pretty northern women made their houses, and ours looked so bare when I came back that I had Nannie learn some such work. I can’t do anything myself except the French embroidery we learned at boarding school in my day, and It Isn’t the kind that’s the style now. It Is a great Improvement, isn’t it? Brightens the old house up. Your Aunt Evelina has prettier things than I have. She went on to Minneapolis too. She was a delegate from Boontown. “A delegate?” I was greatly bewildered. "Yes, from their branch of the W. C. T. U." “The W. C. T. U. what?” Mrs. Caldwell dropped her 175 pounds Into a chair and stared at me, wounded amazement painted on her handsome, middle aged, aquiline countenance.

Adeline,” she said. “Adeline,” she repeated, “you don’t mean to tell me that you have no interest in the Woman’s Christian Temperance union—you, living up there In the north, where the glorious work is so much less obstructed ?” “Indeed, I have a great respect and a great deal of latent interest. Cousin Anne,” I Interrupted. “It has not come exactly In my way to know much about It, but I reported the proceedings of the meeting in New York one day, and they seemed to me curiously Important and significant.” “You didn’t Join?” Cousin Anne still stared at me in touching melancholy. “W’hy, no. It didn’t exactly occur to me.”

I saw Cousin Anne put by the temptation to lecture me Immediately as If It had been a palpable thing visibly pushed. She did it with a sigh and then devoted herself to her hospitalities as one who had long recognized that she had lived in the midst of a stiff necked and froward generation. It was marvelous to see how these Strathboro women—an important minority of them, that is—loved this organization. It was everything of. Important occupation, of wide interest, of expanded life, to them. Prejudices of section, of sex, of society, went down before it. It was represented by women who could not be Ignored or ostracized and who banded themselves together for a sacred cause, and as they would do unheard of things old codes must needs burst to fragments and the unheard of be permitted. The men In their relation to the movement it was a Joy to contemplate. There was something so prlmally and helplessly masculine and chivalrous in the big sheepish way most of them stood back and lifted never a hand to stop proceedings such as all their lives they had declared, and believed themselves sincere in declaring, they would sooner die than permit.

1 found my position in Strathboro changed. Hitherto the fact that I was the daughter of my father and mother had caused the unknown mysteries of a New York newspaper woman’s life to be graciously forgiven me and considerately overlooked, but now everywhere there was a new and vivid interest in what I may sum up as advanced womanhood, and advanced womanhood, alas, I was considered to represent. Our present concern with all this lies in the fact that Cousin Anne’s 18-year-old daughter, the most domestic, onservatlve, well ordered little creat ire 1 ever saw. was predestined by her mother to join the ranks of advanced womanhood, and 1 was expected to assist at the sacrifice. During my stay with them Cousin Anne was visited by her sister, Mrs. Eramley. Mrs. Framloy was generally spoken of as “a character,” and she enjoyed living up to her reputation. Her own children were all sons, and she always tacitly assumed the absence of daughters to lie a proof of her own superior good sense, but naturally this state of things gave her the greater freedom of opinion- ns to how less admirable people should manage theirs. The second day #fter site came she opened up the subject of Nannie. “Anne,” said she, pinning the shirt she was making by hand to her knee ’ and stitching energetically, “why

hasn’t Nannie got soma beaus) I've never seen a sign of a young man about the place. W'bat Is the matter? She is pretty enough.” Cousin Anne was writing at a little table, attending to business for the • V?. C. T. C. She did not answer for a moment. Then she said, a little stlflly: | “S’t’ Ellen” (abbreviated form of Sister Ellen], “I don’t Intend Nannie to waste her time on beaus.- She’s got enongh to do attending to her studies. I’m 1 having her keep them up. I have not let her come out yet.” “Coine out! M-m-m! You and I never did ct.me out, Anne; but when I we were girls we managed to have a mighty gdod time, and first or last half the young men In the country were ! courting us. If there is anything better wojth a girl’s while than that, I’ve never heard of It.” “I propose that Nannie shall And things better worth the while of a rational being In such a world as this,” Cousin Anne replied. “I never heard before that Nannie or any other girl of 18 was a rational | being. 1 pity her if she Is. Do you mean her to be an old maid?” Cousin Anne sealed an envelope with : elaborate care. This was an essentially uncomfortable question. Every Inbred prejudice and many native sentiments rose up within her against the j suggestion, and yet every instinct of expansion, of moral dignity, of ambition, tied her to the course she bad j vaguely blocked out, and It was certainly not a part of that programme that Nannie should marry soon. And how was it to be supposed that the strange, triumphant, world manipulating creature Nannie was to become could ever be accommodated within the matrimonial harbor? Something like this in chaotic, dim form distressed her mind, but Bbe stuck on a stamp witn decision and finally said: j “I don’t know whether or not she will ever marry, S’C Ellen, but at least she shall have my help to become a noble woman, helping the world onward.” “A noble woman! O Lord! I’m a noble woman, Anne, only you’d never see It, Just because I’ve got common sense. ell, well! Yankee notions down here must be a mighty sight worse than they are at home, for somehow or other they do seem to keep on marrying up there, and the | girls have some little frolic, to Judge I by what I hear, before they go into the I business of turning the world upside | down. Are you going to make a , preacher or a \V. C. T. U. lecturer out lof Nannie? She’s got such a gift of ' gab she’d do for either.”

Dear Cousin Anne’s Roman features were touched with an Infantile grief, and the tears came to her fine eyes as she said: “I didn’t think you’d ever make fun of Nannie, S’t’ Ellen. I thought you admired her being ao quiet.” “So I do, so I do, Anne,” said the softened sister, “but that’s the very reason I don’t like to see her spoiled and kept out of her natural amusements. What are you going to do with her anyhow, right away, next thing?” Cousin Anne resumed her air of dignified firmness and replied that Nannlo was going north with me for tfce winter. “What are you going to do with her xthen you get her up there, Adeline?” “Cousin Anne thinks she will have a good chance to look about her and choose some work or profession to devote herself to.” “Upon my word!" Cousin Ellen abandoned the shirt and dropped her i hands Into her lap. “Why, the child’s got enough to live on. and I reckon that’s all she asks.” Just then Nannie, looking very young and pink and pretty in her white frock, came to the door. The mother gave her sister a warning glance. “I won’t do any harm,” was the direct reply. “Come in here, Nannie, | child. You don’t think your old aunt will bite you, do you?" The girl put her hand Into the one outstretched to her with the manner of a good child. ' I “So you are going off to Yankeeland, are you, and get to be a strong minded

Cousin Anne was writing at a little table. woman, like Adeline here?” Nannfe smiled sweetly upon me. ! “What are you going to do up there, honey?” “Mamma thinks I’ll know better when I get there,” said Nannie, a faint shade crossing her face. “Go fetch me a drink in the big gourd. That’s a dear. Well, Anne,” she continued when the girl was out of hearing, “you and Nannie are about as precious a pair of babes in the woods as ever I saw. But, after all, Adeline’s not ns big a> fool as she looks, and I reckon you won’t do anything worse for the time being than waste money and spoil Nannie’s fun. I don’t lielieve Adeline’s friends—the men nil seem to be 50 or older—will be very lively for hes. and I should think.” she added maliciously, “you’d be afraid they would undermine her principles. There don’t seem to be many W. C. T. U. people among ’em.” But Cousin Anne had talked all this

over with me and had settled her course. I wrote to my friend Amy Milman, a young painter who shared my little flat, to engage a certain bedroom from our neighbors in the front apartments, and I came north with Nannie. Amy, who knew something of the state of the case, met her with maternal graciousness and then took me aside, closed a door upon us and asked what in the world I intended to do with her. “I don't intend to do anything,” I declared. “I am simply the tool of circumstances. Probably she will stay here awhile and go home all comfortably enough and take up the life that suits her there.” “No. she won’t,” stated Amy, with solemn emphasis. “We are aiding—you are, that is—and abetting in unfitting one human creature for life. She won’t belong anywhere after she’s tried an independent existence here awhile. She’ll be neither fowl, fish nor flesh.” “Well,” I pleaded, “don’t try to wake up my conscience about it all, Amy, dear. It can do nothing but distress me. I said all I could to Cousin Anne. I wanted this visit to be regarded as Just an outing, a lark. But, no; the child has been loaded down with the obligation to find a life work, and by that her mother means what she calls a career, something at once dazzling and”—

“What did her mother say when you talked to her?" “Say? Why, asked how I should like to marry and live in Strath boro all my life myself, and told me that Nannie is very literary in her tastes, more so than any girl in her class, and that one of her essays had been published in the Strathboro what d’you call it weekly, and that she loved to see a woman eager to help on her sisters, and”— “Stop! Do you think she’s got a bit of talent for anything in the world?” “Not an atom that I can discover, except—what is it James says?—the talent for being the nicest of little girls.” “Maybe if she has not a bit it won’t be so bad. Don’t worry anyhow, you poor girl. Go bring her into the sitting room, and we’ll have some tea, and I’ll give you some newspaper •tuff.”