h of an automobile--a chariot of fire
that would stop but long enough to take us in, when we should know it
immediately for the vehicle of our fate. That conviction had somehow
been with us, and I had really heard our hour begin to strike on Peg's
coming back to us from her co-educative adventure so preposterously
"engaged." I didn't believe in it, in such a manner of becoming so, one
little bit, and I took on myself to hate the same; though that indeed
seemed the last thing to trouble any one else. Her turning up in such a
fashion with the whole thing settled before Father or Mother or Maria or
any of us had so much as heard of the young man, much less seen the
tip of his nose, had too much in common, for my taste, with the rude
betrothals of the people, with some maid-servant's announcement to her
employer that she has exchanged vows with the butcher-boy.

I was indignant, quite artlessly indignant I fear, with the college
authorities, barbarously irresponsible, as it struck me; for when I
broke out about them to poor Mother she surprised me (though I confess
she had sometimes surprised me before), by her deep fatalism. "Oh,
I suppose they don't pretend not to take their students at the
young people's own risk: they can scarcely pretend to control their
affections!" she wonderfully said; she seemed almost shocked, moreover,
that I could impute either to Father or to herself any disposition to
control Peggy's. It was one of the few occasions of my life on which
I've suffered irritation from poor Mother; and yet I'm now not sure,
after all, that she wasn't again but at her old game (even then, for she
has certainly been so since) of protecting poor Father, by feigning a
like flaccidity, from the full appearance, not to say the full dishonor,
of his failure ever to meet a domestic responsibility. It came over
me that there would be absolutely nobody to meet this one, and my own
peculiar chance glimmered upon me therefore on the spot. I can't
retrace steps and stages; suffice it that my opportunity developed and
broadened, to my watching eyes, with each precipitated consequence of
the wretched youth's arrival.

He proved, without delay, an infant in arms; an infant, either,
according to circumstances, crowing and kicking and clamoring for
sustenance, or wailing and choking and refusing even the bottle, to the
point even, as I've just seen in New York, of imminent convulsions. The
"arms" most appropriate to his case sudde