I replied to this—­well, what I could easily reply; but I asked, I recollect, in the very forefront, if she were sending Peg to college to get married.  She declared it was the last thing she was in a hurry about, and that she believed there was no danger, but her great argument let the cat out of the bag.  “Maria feels the want of it—­of a college education; she feels it would have given her more confidence”; and I shall in fact never forget the little look of strange supplication that she gave me with these words.  What it meant was:  “Now don’t ask me to go into the question, for the moment, any further:  it’s in the acute stage—­and you know how soon Maria can bring a question to a head.  She has settled it with your Father—­in other words has settled it for him:  settled it in the sense that we didn’t give her, at the right time, the advantage she ought to have had.  It would have given her confidence—­from the want of which, acquired at that age, she feels she so suffers; and your Father thinks it fine of her to urge that her little sister shall profit by her warning.  Nothing works on him, you know, so much as to hear it hinted that we’ve failed of our duty to any of you; and you can see how it must work when he can be persuaded that Maria—!”

“Hasn’t colossal cheek?”—­I took the words out of her mouth.  “With such colossal cheek what need have you of confidence, which is such an inferior form—?”

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.