Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty Page A

singer's, but it did not, being too soft and timid; Aunt Jim Allen's came out strong. She was growing plumper in the last few years, but she was always delicate and was thought of as the little sister of the family. Her hands (with her mother Laura Allen's rings) most naturally clasped, and then suddenly flew apart—as if she were always eager to hear your story, and then let it surprise her. She could not tolerate a speck of dust in her house, and every room was ready for the inspection of the Queen, Aunt Mac said belittlingly. Her dresses, and Aunt Jim Allen's, were all dainty, with "touches," and they wore little sachets tied and tucked here and there underneath, smelling of clove pinks or violets, nothing "artificial." Aunt Primrose was sweet to Aunt Jim Allen and never said a cross word all day to her or to Lethe or any of the men or her manager. She loved everybody but there was one living man she adored and that was her brother George. "As well I might," she said. She was not scared to live in the house alone with Jim Allen, because she simply had faith nothing would happen to her.
    Both of them would tell you that Jim Allen was the better cake maker, but Primrose was better with preserves and pickles and candy, and knew just the minute any named thing ought to be taken off the fire. They swore by Mashula Hines's cook book, and at other times read Mary Shannon's diary she kept when this was a wilderness, and it was full of things to make and the ways to set out cuttings and the proper times, along with all her troubles and provocations.
    It was eternally cool in summer in this house; like the air of a dense little velvet-green wood it touched your forehead with stillness. Even the phone had a ring like a tiny silver bell. The Grove was really Uncle George's place now; but he had put his two unmarried sisters in the house and given them Little Joe to manage it, and gone to Memphis to practice law when he married that Robbie Reid. Matting lay along the halls, and the silver doorknobs were not quite round but the shape of little muffins, not perfect. Dabney went into the parlor. How softly all the doors shut, in this house by the river—a soft wind always pressed very gently against your closing. How quiet it was, without the loud driving noise of a big fan in every corner as there was at home, even when at moments
people
sighed and fell silent.
    The parlor furniture was exactly like theirs, there were once double parlors here at the Grove, furnished identically in Mashula Hines's day, but how differently everything looked here. Grandmother's and Great-Grandmother's cherished things were so carefully kept here, and the Irish lace curtains were still good except for one little new place of Aunt Primrose's that shone out. Once a cyclone had come and drawn one pair of the curtains out the window and hung them in the top of a tall tree in the swamp, and Laura Allen had had Negroes in the tree all one day instructed to get them down without tearing a thread, while her husband kept begging her to let them come help with the cows bellowing everywhere in the ditches, and then she had mended what could not help but be torn, so that no one could tell now which curtains they were.
    There were two portraits of Mary Shannon in this room, on the dark wall the one Audubon painted down in Feliciana, where she visited home, which nobody liked, and over the mantelpiece the one Great-Grandfather did. It showed the Mary Shannon for whom he had cleared away and built the Grove—it had hung in the first little mud house; he had painted it one wintertime, showing her in a dark dress with arms folded and an expression of pure dream in the almost shyly drawn lips. There was a white Christmas rose from the new doorstep in her severely dressed hair. There were circles under her eyes—he had not been reticent there, for that was the year the yellow fever was worst and she had nursed so many of her people, besides her family and neighbors; and two