A Wagner Matinee (in Short Story Collection Vol. 010 )

MP3 Audio CD. A Wagner Matinee (in Short Story Collection Vol. 010 )

I received one morning a letter, written in pale ink on glassy,
blue-lined notepaper, and bearing the postmark of a little Nebraska
village. This communication, worn and rubbed, looking as though it had
been carried for some days in a coat pocket that was none too clean, was
from my Uncle Howard and informed me that his wife had been left a small
legacy by a bachelor relative who had recently died, and that it would
be necessary for her to go to Boston to attend to the settling of
the estate. He requested me to meet her at the station and render her
whatever services might be necessary. On examining the date indicated
as that of her arrival I found it no later than tomorrow. He had
characteristically delayed writing until, had I been away from home for
a day, I must have missed the good woman altogether.

The name of my Aunt Georgiana called up not alone her own figure,
at once pathetic and grotesque, but opened before my feet a gulf of
recollection so wide and deep that, as the letter dropped from my
hand, I felt suddenly a stranger to all the present conditions of
my existence, wholly ill at ease and out of place amid the familiar
surroundings of my study. I became, in short, the gangling farm boy
my aunt had known, scourged with chilblains and bashfulness, my hands
cracked and sore from the corn husking. I felt the knuckles of my thumb
tentatively, as though they were raw again. I sat again before her
parlor organ, fumbling the scales with my stiff, red hands, while she,
beside me, made canvas mittens for the huskers.

The next morning, after preparing my landlady somewhat, I set out for
the station. When the train arrived I had some difficulty in finding my
aunt. She was the last of the passengers to alight, and it was not unt