his place, and to hold that
he believes himself a better judge than she of the sort of companions he
chooses, she being disabled by the mental constitution of her sex, and
the defects of a girl's training, from knowing the rare quality of boys
who present themselves even to my friendly eyes as dirty, and, when not
patched, ragged. I please myself in my guesses at her character with the
conjecture that she is not satisfied with her sister's engagement to a
fellow-student in a co-educational college, who is looking forward to a
professorship.

In spite of her injustice in regard to his own companions, this
imaginable attitude of hers impresses the boy, if I understand boys. I
have no doubt he reasons that she must be right about something, and as
she is never right about boys, she must be right about brothers-in-law,
potential if not actual. This one may be, for all the boy knows, a
sissy; he inclines to believe, from what he understands of the matter,
that he is indeed a sissy, or he would never have gone to a college
where half the students are girls. He himself, as I have heard, intends
to go to a college, but whether Harvard, or Bryant's Business College,
he has not yet decided. One thing he does know, though, and that is
there are not going to be any girls in it. We have not allowed our
invention so great play in regard to the elder members of our neighbor's
family perhaps because we really know something more about them. Mrs.
Talbert duly called after We came to Eastridge, and when my wife had
self-respectfully waited a proper time, which she made a little more
than a week lest she should feel that she had been too eager for the
acquaintance, she returned the call. Then she met not only Mrs. Talbert,
but Mrs. Talbert's mother, who lives with them, in an anxiety for their
health which would impair her own if she were not of a constitution
such as you do not find in these days of unladylike athletics. She was
inclined to be rather strict with my wife about her own health, and mine
too, and told her she must be careful not to let me work too hard, or
overeat, or leave off my flannels before the weather was settled in the
spring. She said she had heard that I had left a very good position on
a Buffalo paper when I bought the Eastridge Banner, and that the town
ought to feel very much honored. My wife suppressed her conviction that
this was the correct view of the case, in a deprecatory expression
of our happiness in fin