e has told us of your
'renunciation'; of your 'forbidding' her to remain with you; how you
'commanded,' after you had 'begged' her, to return to us, and how her
conscience told her she should stay and share your life in spite of
our long care of her, but that she yielded to your 'wishes' and our
entreaty. What have you ever done for her and what have you to offer
her? She is our daughter, and needless to say we shall still take care
of her, for no one believes you capable of it, even in that miserable
place, and, of course, in time she will return to her better wisdom,
her home, and her duty. I need scarcely say we have given up the happy
months we had planned to spend in Dresden. Henry and I can only stay at
home to pray that her preposterous mania will wear itself out in short
order, as she will find herself unfitted for the ridiculous task which
she insists upon attempting against the earnest wishes of us who have
been more than father and mother to her. Of course, she has talked
volumes of her affection for us, and of her gratitude, which we do not
want--we only want her to stay with us. Please, please try to make her
come back to us--we cannot bear it long. If you are a man you will send
her to us soon. Her excuse for not returning on the day we wired our
intention to go abroad at once (and I may as well tell you now that our
intention to go was formed in order to bring affairs to a crisis and to
draw her away from your influence--we always dreaded her visit to you
and held it off for years)--her excuse was that your best friend, and,
as I understand it, your patron, had been injured in some brawl in
that Christian country of yours--a charming place to take a girl like
her--and she would not leave you in your 'distress' until more was known
of the man's injuries. And now she insists--and you will know it from
her by the next mail--on returning to Plattville, forsooth, because
she has been reading your newspaper, and she says she knows you are in
difficulties over it, and it is her moral obligation--as by some wild
reasoning of her own she considers herself responsible for your ruffling
patron's having been alone when he was shot--to go down and help. I
suppose he made love to her, as all the young men she meets always do,
sooner or later, but I have no fear of any rustic entanglements tor her;
she has never been really interested, save in one affair. We are
quite powerless--we have done everything; but we cannot alte