"Have you no appreciation, girl, of the liberal education it is for you to be with me, to be permitted to read to me, to have such a library as mine at your command?"
"Yes, indeed, Uncle Osmond."
"Well, then?"
"But I don't stay here for the pleasure of your amiable society, dear," she assured him, patting his hand. "You're far too much like your old Scotch Thomas Carlyle that you admire so much. My goodness, what a life Jane must have led with that old curmudgeon!"
"Hold your impudent tongue!"
"Yes, dear."
"Don't speak to me again to-day!"
"Thanks; I'm so glad you don't also require me to be brilliantly conversational. I'd really have to charge extra for that, Uncle Osmond."
"Get me my eggnog!"
In spite of all Osmond Berkeley's precautions, however, Margaret did, of course, go through the intense and fiery ordeal of "falling in love"; for when a maiden's budding soul begins to unfold to the beauty of life, to throb and thrill before the wonder and mystery of the universe, no walled imprisonment can check the course of nature—she is bound to suffer the bitter-sweet experience of becoming enamoured of something, it doesn't much matter what; a cigar-shop Indian will suffice if nothing more lively comes her way. For circumstances are, after all, nothing but "machinery, just meant to give thy life its bent." Berkeley, priding himself on his knowledge of sex-psychology, knowing that girls isolated in boarding-schools fall in love with their woman teachers, and in colleges with each other, nevertheless persuaded himself that he could, in this instance, defeat nature; that Margaret was being safeguarded too absolutely to admit of her finding any outlet whatever for the pent-up emotional current of her womanhood.