y, and it ought to be easy enough for her to
find a husband. He wished heartily that she might soon be happily
married; for he loved her, and knew that she and Susie could never, with
their best endeavours, be great friends. Besides, every woman ought to
have a home of her own, and a husband and children. Whenever he thought
of Anna, he thought exactly this; and when he had reached the
proposition at the end he felt that he could do no more, and began to
think of something else.

His marriage with Susie, a person of whom no one had ever heard, had
brought out and developed stores of unsuspected philosophy in him.
Before that he was quite poor, and very merry; but he loved Estcourt,
and could not bear to see it falling into ruin, and he loved his small
sister, who was then only ten, and wished to give her a decent
education, and what is a man to do? There happened to be no rich
American girls about at that time, so he married Miss Dobbs of
Birmingham, and became a philosopher.

It was hard on Susie that he should become a philosopher at her expense.
She did not like philosophers. She did not understand their silent ways,
and their evenness of temper. After she had done all that Peter wanted
in regard to the place in Devonshire, and had provided Anna with every
luxury in the shape of governesses, and presented her husband with an
heir to the retrieved family fortunes, she thought that she had a right
to some enjoyment too, to some gratification from her position, and was
surprised to find how little was forthcoming. Really no one could do
more than she had done, and yet nothing was done for her. Peter fished,
and read, and was with difficulty removable from Estcourt. Anna was, of
course, too young to be grateful, but there she was, taking everything
as a matter of course, her very unconsciousness an irritation. Susie
wanted to get on in the world, and nobody helped her. She wanted to bury
the Dobbs part of herself, and develop the Estcourt part; but the Dobbs
part was natural, and the Estcourt superficial, and the Dobbses were one
and all singularly unattractive--a race of eager, restless, wiry little
men and women, anxious to get as much as they could, and keep it as long
as they could, a family succeeding in gathering a good deal of money
together in one place, and failing entirely in the art of making
friends. Susie was the best of them, and had been the pretty one at
home; yet she was not in the least a success in Lo