I come at length to the middle sister, my Aunt Leah. I am not one to indulge in indiscriminate panegyric, but malice itself would be hard put to it to say aught but good of her. She was very good-looking in her Nordic way even in late middle life, when I first knew her. She must have been really beautiful as a young woman. She had all the good qualities of her brothers and sisters without the defects of any of them. She was immensely generous, not only with her money but in her thoughts and actions; but her beneficence was consistent and judicious, as contrasted with the indiscriminate lavishness of Aunt Emma and the impulsive and largely self-indulgent generosity of Aunt Julia. She had that purity of heart which is the fruit or the root of religion at its best, without a trace of smugness or religiosity or intolerance. She was a proud woman, with great natural dignity in spite of her strong sense of fun, and with a high spirit notwithstanding all her kindliness. I would not have envied any man or woman who might venture to take a liberty with her; the offender would have been quietly but effectively put in his or her place.
Aunt Leah was as intelligent and as interested in the things of the mind as any member of her family, and she was accomplished in many ways. She was a good pianist, like her sisters, but not such a good crochet-worker as her sister Julia. She was, however, the best knitter of the family, and did much very beautiful work in wool. The accomplishment which I most appreciated was her gift for reading aloud both poetry and prose. Like my father, she was easily and deeply moved by fine and by base actions in real life and in fiction, and these emotions expressed themselves naturally in the modulations of her voice when reading aloud. In my childhood and early boyhood both she and my father read a great deal to me. I enjoyed this immensely at the time, and I am most grateful for it in retrospect. I had, and I still have, a receptive and fairly retentive verbal memory, and long before I could read for myself I could repeat masses of poetry which had been read aloud to me. This included a considerable part of Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome. Naturally there was much in what I listened to which I could not understand in detail. But this did not diminish my enjoyment, whilst it exercised my intellect and gave room for my imagination. When I asked questions of my aunt or my father they were always treated seriously and answered to the measure of my experience and my understanding.
Aunt Leah's accomplishments extended beyond the finer arts to their humbler practical sisters. She was a first-rate cook, with a particularly light hand for pastry and cakes, and she was highly competent in all that concerns the efficient running of a household.
I think that she and my father resembled each other more closely in character than did any two other members of the family. There was certainly a very strong bond of affection between them. I never heard an angry word pass between them in the twenty-five years in which I grew up in the household which they shared. Nothing would have stirred my father's wrath more than any sign of disobedience or rudeness or neglect on my part toward my aunt. One of the few points in my manners and morals on which I can honestly look back without dissatisfaction is that I had the grace to love and respect her and that I very seldom indeed behaved ill toward her. She, on her side, devoted all the latter part of her life to my father and me. I imagine (though I do not care to peep and psychologise about my aunt's emotional life) that my father was for her a kind of substitute for the husband, and I for the children, whom she so inexplicably never had.
(C. D. Broad, "Autobiography," in The Philosophy of C. D. Broad, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 10 [New York: Tudor Publishing Company, 1959], 1-68, at 20-2 [essay written in 1954])
Note from KBJ: This keeps the promise I made here. I get chills when I read the part about Broad having had "the grace to love and respect" his Aunt Leah.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 