al College, on
which her soul is set. But to accomplish this, I must first do something
with Sylvia; but that girl has a conscience like a fence post, and a
disposition like a squirrel that skips along the rails. I could do
nothing with her. She had sworn to be a Sister of Martha for life, and
yet she would not consent to act like an out and out sister, and give up
all that stuff about typewriting for you, and the other nonsensical
notions of co-Marthaism, with which you infected her. She stoutly stuck
to it, in spite of all the arguments I could use, that there was no good
reason why you and she, as well as the other sisters and some other
gentlemen, could not work together in the noble cause of I don't
remember what fol-de-rol. Pretty co-Marthas you and she would make!

"Then I tried to induce Marcia to give up her fancies of
responsibilities and all that, and to leave the girl in the charge of
the present Mother Inferior, an elderly woman called Sister Sarah, who
in my opinion could be quite as much of a griffin as the case demanded.
But she would not listen to me. She had been the cause of her cousin's
joining the sisterhood, and now she would not desert her, and she said a
lot about the case requiring not only vigilance, but kindness and
counsel, and that sort of thing. Then I went back to the city, and tried
my hand on Sylvia's mother, but with no success at all. She is like a
stone gate-post, and always was, and declared that as Sylvia had entered
the institution because Marcia was there, it was the latter's duty to
give up everything else, and to throw herself between Sylvia and your
mischievous machinations and to stay there until you were married to
somebody, and the danger was past."

"Machinations!" I ejaculated,--"a most unreasonable person."

"Perhaps so," said Miss Laniston, "but not a bit more than the rest of
you. You are the most unreasonable lot I ever met with. Having failed
utterly with the three women, I had some idea of sending for you, and of
trying to persuade you to marry some one who is not under the
sisterhood's restrictions, and so smooth out this wretched tangle, but I
knew that you were more obstinate and stiff-necked than any of them, and
so concluded to save myself the trouble of reasoning with you."

"A wise decision," I remarked.

"But I could not give up," she continued; "I could not bear the thought
that my friend Marcia Raynor should sacrifice herself in this way. I
went back t