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needed more affection than she got. She would
drain the world of affection, and then, fearing that it had been given only
because she had asked for it, she would have to ask for more.
    "Sugah," she would say to whichever of us children had come in sight,
"come here and kiss yo' Aunt Judith!" And she was capable of issuing this
invitation with the broad hint that, because of her frail health, the grave
might claim her before we would have a chance to kiss her again. I am glad
to remember that, in spite of everything, I felt a genuine affection for her,
especially in the time before Uncle Andrew's death -before fate authenticated her predisposition to woe. In those days she could be a pleasant
companion for a small boy, and I remember afternoons when we sat
together while she read to me from the evening paper a reporter's serialized account of the movement of a group of soldiers from training camp
to troopship to battle. We both became deeply interested in those articles
and looked forward to them. I remember how our reading fitted together our interest in the story of the soldiers, our sense of great history unfolding, and our mutual affection and pleasure. And yet when she turned
toward me with her need, as sooner or later she always did, it was hard to
provide a response satisfactory to either of us. It is hard to give the final
kiss of this earthly life over and over again. Mostly I submitted silently to
her hugs, kisses, and other attentions, profiting the best I could from that
exotic smell of cigarette smoke and perfume that hung about her.

    Her tone of self-reference almost always carried an overtone of selfpity. She asked for pity as she asked for affection -and her demand, as
was inevitable in that hopeless emotional economy of hers, always outran the available supply. As she strove forward with her various claims on
other people, she more and more destroyed the possibility of a genuine
mutuality with anybody. Her need for love isolated and estranged her
from everybody who might have loved her, and from everybody who did.
    In her self-centeredness and her constant appeal to others to fulfill
her unfulfillable needs, she was like Momma-pie. Both of them, I think,
belonged to a lineage of spoiled women. From the time of her divorce,
Momma-pie had lived with her expansive pretensions in a small room at
the Broadfield Hotel on the income from a moderately good farm that
she had never seen except from the road. During her life at the hotel she
did nothing for herself except for the light and polite housekeeping of
her room. Aunt Judith was a fastidious housekeeper and a good cookshe and Uncle Andrew had never had the money for household helpbut her work always bore the implication of her poor health, and hints
were often passed between her and Momma-pie that whatever she did
she was not quite able to do.
    The would-be aristocracy of the Hargrave upper crust was, after all, I
think, a cruel burden for Aunt Judith and Momma-pie. According to the
terms that they accepted and lived by, they were important because they
were who they were. That was their axiom. And so there they were, suspended in the ethereal element of their pretension, utterly estranged
from the farms and the work from which they lived, hard put to demonstrate their usefulness to much of anybody, and forced to bear the
repeated proofs that Uncle Andrew assumed almost nothing that they
assumed.
    It is pleasant and useless to wonder what might have become of Aunt Judith if she had married a milder, more tractable man, just as it is pleasant and useless to wonder what might have become of Uncle Andrew if
he had married a more robust and self-sustaining woman. Such might-
have-beens only renew the notice that Aunt Judith and Uncle Andrew
married each other, and in doing so joined snow and fire.

    Uncle Andrew, except that he possessed "aristocratic good looks,"
could not have been anyone that Aunt Judith ever saw in her