My mind was fixed, positively and finally,
that the habit of interference in the Talbert family must be broken up.
I never could understand what it is that makes people so crazy to
interfere, especially in match-making. It is a lunacy. It is presuming,
irreverent, immoral, intolerable. So I worked out my little plan and
went to sleep.
Peggy took her father's decree (which was administered to her privately
after breakfast on Tuesday) most loyally. Of course, he could not give
her his real reasons, and so she could not answer them. But when she
appeared at dinner it was clear, in spite of a slight rosy hue about
her eyes, that she had decided to accept the sudden change in the
situation like a well-bred angel--which, in fact, she is.
I had run down to Whitman in the morning train to make a call on young
Goward, and found him rather an amiable boy, under the guard of an
adoring mother, who thought him a genius and was convinced that he had
been entrapped by designing young women. I agreed with her so heartily
that she left me alone with him for a half-hour. His broken arm was
doing well; his amatoriness was evidently much reduced by hospital
diet; he was in a repentant frame of mind and assured me that he knew
he had been an ass as well as a brute (synonymes, dear boy), and that
he was now going West to do some honest work in the world before he
thought any more about girls.
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