THE SCOUT MASTER
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Mother's own sister, staying with us then after her divorce from Uncle
Bazil) -she would tell them that as each of her children passed seven–
teen she intended either to give them up as a bad job or, if they didn't
cll turn out as Virginia Ann had, to sit back and rest on her laurels.
Yet Mother's groans were as loud as Father's when they heard Vir–
ginia Ann greeting her date at the front door with, "Well, well, well,
if it isn't my country cousin!" I would turn my eyes to her and Father
as soon as I
he~rd
Virginia Ann say this, for I knew it was one of
the things they could not abide.
Aunt Grace was never gentle with people the way Uncle Jake
was. She would tell Mother and Father that they were real fools to
be so critical of Virginia Ann, who she said was one of the brightest,
cleanest girls she had ever known. Hadn't this daughter of theirs had
the finest average in her junior class? And wasn't she studying practical
things even in high school (Business Administration, Accounting,
Shorthand!)? Father and Mother would ned and smile. Father would
be put in such a grand good humor by Aunt Grace's admiration of his
daughter that he would begin to tease her about some unmarried
man or other in their acquaintance. Or he would take off his spectacles
and smile benevolently at her as she ranted, she now making a show
of her outspokenness: Wasn't Virginia Ann's behavior with her beaux
above all suspicion? she would ask. Certainly she was one of the few
young girls who never-Never once! Aunt Grace could vouch for it.
She
had the girl's confidence- never stepped outside the front door
to say goodnight to her date.
"Poor Grace!" Father and Mother would sit for a long while
after one of these outbursts and lament the hard lot that had been
Aunt Grace's. Uncle Bazil was such a hopeless ne'er-do-well, really a
drunken scoundrel whose vanity and social ambitions had been his
ruination; and yet they believed that deep in her heart Grace loved
him still. And that was going to make it hard for her ever to marry
again. How sad it was. She was still a comparatively young woman.
"Today women of thirty-eight are looked upon as quite young, you
know," one of them would say.
Anrl, for all she had been through, they agreed, Aunt Grace
showed her years remarkably little. Whoever would have guessed that
she was actually only five years younger than dear, sweet Jake? She
had a certain girlish prettiness about her that would always deny
her age.
Yet it wasn't that Uncle Jake's own sad life told on him ("No
