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--the only thing she can't swagger about) still affronts her sight. Maria also, to do her justice, has a vague hankering, under which she has always been restive, to make up for the outrage; and the form the compunction now takes is to get her away. It's one of the facts of our situation all round, I may thus add, that every one wants to get some one else away, and that there are indeed one or two of us upon whom, to that end, could the conspiracy only be occult enough--which it can never!--all the rest would effectively concentrate. Father would like to shunt Granny--it IS monstrous his having his mother-in-law a fixture under his roof; though, after all, I'm not sure this patience doesn't rank for him as one of those domestic genialities that allow his conscience a bolder and tighter business hand; a curious service, this sort of thing, I note, rendered to the business conscience throughout our community. Mother, at any rate, and small blame to her, would like to “shoo” off Eliza, as Lorraine and I, in our deepest privacy, call Aunt Elizabeth; the Tom Prices would like to extirpate US, of course; we would give our most immediate jewel to clear the sky of the Tom Prices; und so weiter. And I think we should really all band together, for once in our lives, in an unnatural alliance to get rid of Eliza. The beauty as to THIS is, moreover, that I make out the rich if dim, dawn of that last-named possibility (which I've been secretly invoking, all this year, for poor Mother's sake); and as the act of mine own right hand, moreover, without other human help. But of that anon; the IMMEDIATELY striking thing being meanwhile again the strange stultification of the passions in us, which prevents anything ever from coming to an admitted and avowed head.