sin with her, to see all, or to follow any premise to it in the right direction. Still, there was the happy chance, at the time the question came up, that she had retained, on the subject of promiscuous colleges, the mistrust of the age of crinoline: as to which in fact that little old photograph, with its balloon petticoat and its astonishingly flat, stiff “torso,” might have imaged some failure of the attempt to blow the heresy into her. The true inwardness of the history, at the crisis, was that our fell Maria had made up her mind that Peg should go--and that, as I have noted, the thing our fell Maria makes up her mind to among us is in nine cases out of ten the thing that is done. Maria still takes, in spite of her partial removal to a wider sphere, the most insidious interest in us, and the beauty of her affectionate concern for the welfare of her younger sisters is the theme of every tongue. She observed to Lorraine, in a moment of rare expansion, more than a year ago, that she had got 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.