# Growing Up (Vorse)/Chapter 49

IT happened next day. Afterward Alice believed that it was either second-sight or telepathy that had brought the doleful name of Brewster to her mind.
The Brewsters were three sable-hung and well-to-do maiden ladies who had been a dark cloud on the horizon of Alice's young girlhood. During the time of her engagement, whenever she had specially wished to see Tom alone, the Brewsters, with mourning dripping from them like black seaweed, had appeared. They had, it seemed, an incredible number of relatives, and these relatives had a habit of dying off like flies; and no wonder, Tom had said, for let any one of their numerous tribe be ill and the crape-hung Brewsters, one or more, would appear, with a funereal face, ready to nurse a sufferer through a last illness. They reveled in death-bed scenes. The excitement of their lives was funerals, and they said openly they never expected to go out of mourning.
They had some vague relationship to Alice, and when they descended and asked in funereal tones:
"How is your dear mother to-day?" as though prepared to hear the worst, anger had risen in her heart, for Alice's mother was a young-looking and healthy woman.
When Alice came down the street from the butcher's the next day and saw a strange motor-car in front of her house, her heart sank.
"I hope to heaven," she thought, "whoever they are, they're only calling. I hope they haven't come to stay."
​Another orgy of chickens, and Alice's hope of a new hat, bright vision which still beckoned her afar off, would vanish forever.
The motor was an elegant but melancholy-looking affair. The man who sat in it was decorous and elderly and sad of appearance.
"Who's come?" asked Sara. Then she whispered to her mother, "Do you suppose it's Brewsters?"
"Certainly not," said Alice shortly. "Of course it isn't! It couldn't be."
"Why couldn't it?" asked Sara, still in her hushed whisper. She clung closer to her mother and shivered theatrically. Seeing that her child hoped it was Brewsters, Alice longed to shake her.
In the sitting-room she heard the voice of her Mother-in-law, pitched in the tones of one who is making conversation under difficulties, the voice of one who, even in the presence of pain and suffering, will not be down-hearted. There was even a note of defiance in her relative's voice. Alice felt this even before her eyes fell upon the three black-robed visitors. They all rose at her entrance and held out six crepe-laden arms to greet her.
"Oh, my dear," they said, and a hint of tears was in their voices, "how like your dear mother you are!"
They spoke in a tone as though Alice's mother were recently dead. One could have sworn they had come on a visit of condolence. Had Alice not received a cheerful letter from her mother that very morning she might have thought them the bearers of sinister news. As it was, she choked back with difficulty her desire to laugh. She knew if she did laugh she would continue to laugh until she wept, for hysteria lay behind it.
She managed, however, to greet them appropriately, but without her eyes meeting those of her Mother-in-law, ​who, Alice knew, shared her feelings concerning the Brewsters.
"And that is your dear little girl," said one of the ladies solemnly.
"She's the picture of your dear aunt Lydia, your aunt that you will hardly remember!" remarked the eldest Miss Brewster. Here Alice faltered forth:
"Sara Dear, come and meet Miss Brewster."
But, instead of coming to meet Miss Brewster, Sara the valiant, the beater-off of Brewsters, flew to her mother and clasped her frantically around the knees.
"Oo-oo-oo-oo!" she cried. "It's Brewsters! Oo-oo! It's Brewsters!"
Then she fell to sobbing. One could distinguish among her words:
"Ghouls! Vampires!" and yet she was coherent enough, so that something penetrated not only to her Grandmother, but to the three ladies who looked at her, first with astonishment and then with a frozen dignity. It was only too plain that Sara had not heard of Brewsters for the first time, and heard of them unflatteringly. An awful silence reigned among them. After which Sara cried, "I'll set Uncle Zotsby's dog on 'em!"
"Hush, Sara!" said Alice inadequately.
Tom's Mother exclaimed, "Well, of all things!"
A cautious little head, the head of Jamie, peered round the corner of the door. His mouth was tightened into a little line. Courage was in his eyes. In his hands he held a bow and arrow, constructed from part of an ancient hoop, the homemade arrow blunted at the point in the hope that it might not inadvertently put out some one's eye. Jamie shot his arrow, which clattered harmlessly upon the floor, and then fled. At this Alice found her voice.
​"I must find out what ails Sara," she faltered, and led her weeping child away.
When Alice returned after ministering to Sara there were no Brewsters. Of all the company there remained only Mrs. Marcey.
"Well, of all things, Alice Marcey!" she cried. "I never have liked the Brewsters, but I will say I think they have had trouble enough in this life without your making a bugaboo of them to your children so that they shriek with terror at the sight of them. Pierced to the heart is what they were! And how can you be so lacking in heart yourself, not to speak of Tom? I've never so wished that the earth would swallow me up! They've gone away, poor things, with the firm conviction that the least you have done was to threaten Sara that the Brewsters would get her if she wasn't good!"
Robert appeared in the doorway. His face was flushed and there was a vague swelling under his left jaw. He yawned crossly.
"Mother," he said, "I wish you'd rout Jamie out of my room. He's sitting in the corner talking about Brewsters, and he woke me up."
"Woke you up!" cried his grandma. "Whatever were you doing sleeping at this hour of the day, Robert?"
"I don't know. I'm hot—I've got a headache. I don't know what makes me so cross—I guess it was because I couldn't go motoring with the Mullinses."
"This child's got a fever," his Grandmother announced. She ran an experienced finger beneath his jaws, at which Robert said "Ouch!" "What he's got is mumps," declared his Grandmother; "it's not for nothing that I nursed Tom and all his cousins through the mumps."
​It was here that Alice Marcey made a cryptic remark. It was:
"What's mumps to motors?"
Her mother-in-law looked at her sharply. Alice had never taken the sickness of her children thus calmly.
"Well, I'm sorry for you, Alice. I won't say another word about Brewsters, though scandalous is my name for it. Now," she pursued, "I suppose you'll be quarantined. You may as well have the red card tacked up on your house, 'Contagious Disease,' at once, because I suppose they'll all come down. Most likely you're in for a siege."
"They'll have to have it sooner or later," Alice returned with philosophy.
For with that red ticket upon her house, for a time, she knew, she was safe from both Mullinses and Brewsters, from Tom's cousins in Pennsylvania and her own from near Boston.