“Then you think you’ll really be an architect?” I asked.

“Why, if it’s possible.  ’Faith, I’m not so young any more that I still want to be a soldier, or a sailor either.  One thing, ’twill take years of study; I’ll have to go to Europe for that.”

“To England?”

“First of all.”

“What will Mr. Faringfield say to that?”

“He will not mind it so much in my case.  I’m not of the Faringfield blood.”

“Egad,” said I, “there’s some of the Faringfield blood hankers for a sight of London.”

“Whose?  Ned’s?”

“No.  Margaret’s.”

We were young men now, and she would not let us call her Madge any more.  What I had said was true.  She had not grown up without hearing and reading much of the great world beyond the sea, and wishing she might have her taste of its pleasures.  She first showed a sense of her deprivation—­for it was a deprivation for a rich man’s daughter—­when she finished at the dame-school and we boys entered college.  Then she hinted, very cautiously, that her and Fanny’s education was being neglected, and mentioned certain other New York gentlemen’s daughters, who had been sent to England to boarding-schools.

Delicately as she did this, the thought that his favourite child could harbour a wish that involved going to England, was a blow to Mr. Faringfield.  He hastened to remove all cause of complaint on the score of defective education.  He arranged that the music teacher, who gave the girls their lessons in singing and in playing upon the harpsichord and guitar, should teach them four days a week instead of two.  He engaged Mr. Cornelius to become an inmate of his house and to give them tuition out of his regular school hours.  He paid a French widow to instruct them in their pronunciation, their book-French and grammar being acquired under Mr. Cornelius’s teaching.  And so, poor girls, they got only additional work for Margaret’s pains.  But both of them were docile, Fanny because it was her nature to be so, Margaret because she had taken it into her head to become an accomplished lady.  We never guessed her dreams and ambitions in those years, and to this day I often wonder at what hour in her girlhood the set design took possession of her, that design which dominated all her actions when we so little guessed its existence.  Besides these three instructors, the girls had their dancing-master, an Englishman who pretended to impart not only the best-approved steps of a London assembly-room, but its manners and graces as well.

So much for the education of the girls, Philip, and myself.  Ned Faringfield’s was interrupted by his expulsion from King’s for gross misconduct; and was terminated by his disgrace at Yale College (whither his father had sent him in vain hope that he might behave better away from home and more self-dependent) for beating a smaller student whom he had cheated at a clandestine game of cards.  His home-coming