their two futures perfectly fixed, and that as
Peggy appeared to have "some mind," though how much she wasn't yet sure,
it should be developed, what there was of it, on the highest modern
lines: Peggy would never be thought generally, that is physically,
attractive anyway. She would see about Alice, the brat, later on, though
meantime she had her idea--the idea that Alice was really going to have
the looks and would at a given moment break out into beauty: in which
event she should be run for that, and for all it might be worth, and
she, Maria, would be ready to take the contract.

This is the kind of patronage of us that passes, I believe, among her
more particular intimates, for "so sweet" of her; it being of course
Maria all over to think herself subtle for just reversing, with a
"There--see how original I am?" any benighted conviction usually
entertained. I don't know that any one has ever thought Alice, the brat,
intellectual; but certainly no one has ever judged her even potentially
handsome, in the light of no matter which of those staggering
girl-processes that suddenly produce features, in flat faces, and
"figure," in the void of space, as a conjurer pulls rabbits out of a
sheet of paper and yards of ribbon out of nothing. Moreover, if any one
SHOULD know, Lorraine and I, with our trained sense for form and for
"values," certainly would. However, it doesn't matter; the whole thing
being but a bit of Maria's system of bluffing in order to boss. Peggy
hasn't more than the brain, in proportion to the rest of her, of a
small swelling dove on a window-sill; but she's extremely pretty and
absolutely nice, a little rounded pink-billed presence that pecks up
gratefully any grain of appreciation.

I said to Mother, I remember, at the time--I took that plunge: "I hope
to goodness you're not going to pitch that defenceless child into any
such bear garden!" and she replied that to make a bear-garden you first
had to have bears, and she didn't suppose the co-educative young men
could be so described. "Well then," said I, "would you rather I should
call them donkeys, or even monkeys? What I mean is that the poor girl--a
perfect little DECORATIVE person, who ought to have iridescent-gray
plumage and pink-shod feet to match the rest of her--shouldn't be thrust
into any general menagerie-cage, but be kept for the dovecote and the
garden, kept where we may still hear her coo. That's what, at college,
they'll make her unlearn;