Of course it must be an island! It was marked out for an island when first the waters were gathered up and the dry land appeared. I think all the happy places are islands--I should like to make one of Italy. I am convinced that when the Garden of Eden is definitely settled (and Major Upgrove is trying to persuade me to come with him to find it--he has a theory) it will be found to be a secret isle in some great estuary or arm of that ageless Eastern river suspected by the major. Surely that mysterious Apple (of whose powers Margarita was once so sceptical) never grew on any vulgar, easily-to-be-come-at mainland! No, it lurks to-day in its own island Paradise, and the angel with the flaming sword cut the land apart from all common ground so that the furrows smoked beneath it as the floods raced in. If we find it--the major and I--shall we bring some apples back to Peggy? In truth, I am none too sure. Why my darling's sex has been so eager for that Apple is not yet entirely evident--though I am not too stupidly obstinate to admit that it may be evident, one day. But the fact remains that Eve certainly regretted it, and Adam, one would suppose, must have, for he has been settling dressmaker's accounts ever since! As to the position held by this father of mankind among the Bradley children, by the way, volumes might be written. To suppose that Barbara Jencks, their bond slave in all else, has remitted an atom of her zeal in bringing them into the state of religious conviction enjoyed by the Governour-General's family, would indicate the densest ignorance of her character. And success has not been entirely lacking, for my namesake delights in the battles of the Kings and Sue's sweet life is a very Sermon on the Mount. But Lockwood still sacrifices to Pan among the beehives and propitiates the Thunder God with favourite kittens, and Roger the Second long ago informed his would-be mentor, to her horror, that if a fellow tried to be like his father and told the truth and worked hard, he thought that fellow could take his chances with God! Dear, obstinate lad, with your cleft chin and your blue eyes, it is not your grandmother, who leaves her Emerson and her Psalms unread together, when she can fill her keen, proud eyes with you, that will deny your simple creed! But my little Peggy has outgrown Pan, and scorns to appease her baby brother's deities. "I asked Roger," she said to me one late afternoon, when we sat in her mother's rocky seat and watched the red sun sink, "why the sun was here--just so that we could see things? And he said yes. And the moon the same way, for night. But that little blind girl I see in the Park, in New York, _she_ can't see things, Jerry dear. She never can. What is that for?" "I can't tell, sweetheart." "You don't know, Jerry dear?" "No, Peggy, I don't know." "But someone knows?" "That I can't tell, either." She turned her serious, deep eyes on me.