Considering how little satisfaction I got from it at first it
is remarkable that I should not have grown more tired of wondering
what mystic rites of ennui the Misses Bordereau celebrated in their
darkened rooms; whether this had always been the tenor of their life
and how in previous years they had escaped elbowing their neighbors.
It was clear that they must have had other habits and other circumstances;
that they must once have been young or at least middle-aged.
There was no end to the questions it was possible to ask about
them and no end to the answers it was not possible to frame.
I had known many of my country-people in Europe and was familiar
with the strange ways they were liable to take up there; but the Misses
Bordereau formed altogether a new type of the American absentee.
Indeed it was plain that the American name had ceased to have
any application to them--I had seen this in the ten minutes I
spent in the old woman's room. You could never have said whence
they came, from the appearance of either of them; wherever it
was they had long ago dropped the local accent and fashion.
There was nothing in them that one recognized, and putting the question
of speech aside they might have been Norwegians or Spaniards.
Miss Bordereau, after all, had been in Europe nearly three-quarters
of a century; it appeared by some verses addressed to her by
Aspern on the occasion of his own second absence from America--
verses of which Cumnor and I had after infinite conjecture
established solidly enough the date--that she was even then,
as a girl of twenty, on the foreign side of the sea.
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