Not that Josephine admired Miss Schenectady, or thought that she herself
could ever be like her. The old lady was a type of her class; intelligent
and well versed in many subjects--even learned she might have been called
by some. But to Joe's view, essentially European by nature and education,
it seemed as though her aunt, like many Bostonians, judged everything--
literature, music, art of all kinds, history and the doings of great men--
by one invariable standard. Her comments on what she heard and read were
uniformly delivered from the same point of view, in the same tone of
practical judgment, and with the same assumption of original superiority.
It was the everlasting "Carthago delenda" of the Roman orator. Whatever
the world wrote, sang, painted, thought, or did, the conviction remained
unshaken in Miss Schenectady's mind that Beacon Street was better than
those things, and that of all speeches and languages known and spoken in
the world's history, the familiar dialect of Boston was the one best
calculated by Providence and nature to express and formulate all manner of
wisdom.
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