AUNTS.
Thatyoung creature whom you see there,” said the God of Love, as he led me on, “is the chief captain of my war, the one that has brought most men under my banners. The elderly person that is leading her along by the hand is her aunt.”
“Heraunt, did you say?” I replied; “heraunt? Then there is an end of all my love for her. That word ‘aunt’is a counter-poison that has disinfected me entirely, and quite healed the wound your well-planted arrow was beginning to make in my heart. For, however much a man may be in love, there can be no doubt anauntwill always be enough to purge him clean of it. Inquisitive, suspicious, envious,—one or the other she cannot fail to be,—and if the niece have the luck to escape, the lover never has; for if she is envious, she wants him for herself; and if she is only suspicious, she still spoils all comfort, so disconcerting every little project, and so disturbing every little nice plan, as to render pleasure itself unsavoury.”
“Why, what a desperately bad opinion you have of aunts?” said Love.
“To be sure I have,” said I. “If the state of innocence in which Adam and Eve were created had nothing else to recommend it, the simple fact that there could have been noauntsin Paradise would have been enough for me. Why, every morning, as soon as I get up, I cross myself and say, ‘By the sign of the Holy Rood, from all aunts deliver us this day, good Lord.’And every time I repeat thePater Noster, after ‘Lead us not into temptation,’I always add, ‘nor into the way of aunts either.’”
Jacinto Polo (?) (fl. 1630). Trans. Ticknor.