she'll learn to roar and snarl with the other
animals. Think of the vocal sounds with which she may come back to us!"
Mother appeared to think, but asked me, after a moment, as a result
of it, in which of the cages of the New York Art League menagerie, and
among what sort of sounds, I had found Lorraine--who was a product of
co-education if there ever had been one, just as our marriage itself had
been such a product.

I replied to this--well, what I could easily reply; but I asked, I
recollect, in the very forefront, if she were sending Peg to college
to get married. She declared it was the last thing she was in a hurry
about, and that she believed there was no danger, but her great argument
let the cat out of the bag. "Maria feels the want of it--of a college
education; she feels it would have given her more confidence"; and I
shall in fact never forget the little look of strange supplication that
she gave me with these words. What it meant was: "Now don't ask me to
go into the question, for the moment, any further: it's in the acute
stage--and you know how soon Maria can BRING a question to a head. She
has settled it with your Father--in other words has settled it FOR him:
settled it in the sense that we didn't give HER, at the right time,
the advantage she ought to have had. It would have given her
confidence--from the want of which, acquired at that age, she feels
she so suffers; and your Father thinks it fine of her to urge that her
little sister shall profit by her warning. Nothing works on him, you
know, so much as to hear it hinted that we've failed of our duty to any
of you; and you can see how it must work when he can be persuaded that
Maria--!"

"Hasn't colossal cheek?"--I took the words out of her mouth. "With
such colossal cheek what NEED have you of confidence, which is such an
inferior form--?"

The long and short was of course that Peggy went; believing on her
side, poor dear, that it might for future relations give her the pull
of Maria. This represents, really, I think, the one spark of guile in
Peggy's breast: the smart of a small grievance suffered at her sister's
hands in the dim long-ago. Maria slapped her face, or ate up her
chocolates, or smeared her copy-book, or something of that sort; and the
sound of the slap still reverberates in Peg's consciousness, the missed
sweetness still haunts her palate, the smutch of the fair page (Peg
writes an immaculate little hand and Maria a wretched one--th