y these things, but I
know she thinks them for me, thinks that a woman's love is just all
forgiveness and indulgence. By that she could--she did work on my
nerves. But"--and her gray eyes glanced so beautifully and so darkly
with a girl's fine, straight, native, healthy spirit as she said it--"I
COULDN'T marry any man but one that I admired."

"I'm sure you couldn't," I said, firmly. "And, my dear child, I
must confess I fail to understand why your sister should wish so
patronizingly for you a fortune she would never have accepted for
herself. How can she possibly like for you such a mawkish and a morbid
thing as the prospect of a marriage with a man in whom neither you nor
any other person feels the presence of one single absolute and manly
quality?"

"Why, mother, I have never heard you speak so strongly before--"

At that moment Lena came searching through the hall, and knocking at the
door of my room, next Peggy's, to announce Lorraine. The kind-hearted
girl was with us constantly, and of the greatest unobtrusive solace to
Peggy in those three days after our travellers had all gone, one after
the other, like the fairy-tale family, at the chance word of Clever
Alice.

It was on the fifth morning afterward, as I was sitting on the piazza
hemming an organdie ruffle for my big little girl--she does shoot up so
fast--that I heard on the gravel Charles's footstep.

For some time after his arrival, as he sat, with his hat thrown off,
talking lightly of his New York sojourn, I was so completely glad to see
him, and to see him looking so well and in such buoyant spirits, that I
could think of nothing else until he mentioned taking tea "At the
Sign of the Three-legged Stool" with Lorraine's sisters, with Lyman
Wilde--and with Aunt Elizabeth.

My work dropped out of my hands.

He laughed. "Yes. Dear mother, since you never have seen him, I don't
know that I can hope to convey any right conception of Wilde's truly
remarkable character. He is, to begin with, the best of men. Picture, if
you can, a nature with a soul completely beautiful and selfless, and a
nervous surface quite as pachydermatous and indiscriminating as that
of an ox. Wilde accepts everybody's estimate of himself. Not only the
quality of his mercy, but also of his admiration, is quite unstrained.
So that he sees the friend of his youth not at all as I or any humanized
perception at the Crafts Settlement would see her, but quite as she
sees herself, as a