exactly, to appear a mere contemporary illustration (being all the while three times the true picture) in order that her parent shall have the importance of the Family Portrait.  I don’t mean of course that she has told me so; but she cannot see that if she hasn’t that importance Granny has none other; and it’s therefore as if she pretended she had a ruff, a stomacher, a farthingale and all the rest—­grand old angles and eccentricities and fine absurdities:  the hard white face, if necessary, of one who has seen witches burned.

She hasn’t any more than any one else among us a gleam of fine absurdity:  that’s a product that seems unable, for the life of it, and though so indispensable (say) for literary material, to grow here; but, exquisitely determined she shall have Character lest she perish—­while it’s assumed we still need her—­Mother makes it up for her, with a turn of the hand, out of bits left over from her own, far from economically as her own was originally planned; scraps of spiritual silk and velvet that no one takes notice of missing.  And Granny, as in the dignity of her legend, imposes, ridiculous old woman, on every one—­Granny passes for one of the finest old figures in the place, while Mother is never discovered.  So is history always written, and so is truth mostly worshipped.  There’s indeed one thing, I’ll do her the justice to say, as to which she has a glimmer of vision—­as to which she had it a couple of years ago; I was thoroughly with her in her deprecation of the idea that Peggy should be sent, to crown her culture, to that horrid co-educative college from which the poor child returned the other day so preposterously engaged to be married; and, if she had only been a little more actively with me we might perhaps between us have done something about it.  But she has a way of deprecating with her long, knobby, mittened hand over her mouth, and of looking at the same time, in a mysterious manner, down into one of the angles of the room—­it reduces her protest to a feebleness:  she’s incapable of seeing in it herself more than a fraction of what it has for her, and really thinks it would be wicked and abandoned, would savor of Criticism, which is the cardinal 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