ined 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 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