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.

I said to Mother, I remember, at the time—­I took that plunge:  “I hope to goodness you’re not going to pitch that defenceless child into any such bear garden!” and she replied that to make a bear-garden you first had to have bears, and she didn’t suppose the co-educative young men could be so described.  “Well then,” said I, “would you rather I should call them donkeys, or even monkeys?  What I mean is that the poor girl—­a perfect little decorative person, who ought to have iridescent-gray plumage and pink-shod feet to match the rest of her —­shouldn’t be thrust into any general menagerie-cage, but be kept for the dovecote and the garden, kept where we may still hear her coo.  That’s what, at college, they’ll make her unlearn; she’ll learn to roar and snarl with the other animals.  Think of the vocal sounds with which she may come back to us!” Mother appeared to think, but asked me, after a moment, as a result of it, in which of the cages of the New York Art League menagerie, and among what sort of sounds, I had found Lorraine—­who was a product of co-education if there ever had been one, just as our marriage itself had been such a product.