"Well, he's dead!" Peggy would reply; "I don't see what good it does to bother about him now. Who cares what he did, all that time ago?"
"But," Margaret explained patiently, "if he had not done the things, Peggy, don't you see, everything would have been different. We must know, mustn't we, how it all came about that our life is what it is now? We must see what we came from, and who the men were that made the changes, and brought us on and up."
"I don't see why!" said Peggy; "I don't see what difference it makes to me that Alfred played the harp. I don't want to play the harp, and I never saw any one who did. It is rather fun about the cakes, but he was awfully stupid to let them burn, seems to me."
Not a thrill could Margaret awaken by any recital of the sorrows and sufferings of the Boy Kings, or even of her favourite Prince Arthur. When her voice broke in the recital of his piteous tale, Peggy would look up at her coolly and say, "How horrid of them! But he would have been dead by this time anyway, Margaret; why do you care so much?"
Still Margaret persevered, never losing hope, simply because she could not believe that the subject itself could fail to interest any one in his senses. It was her own fault a good deal, she tried to think; she did not tell the story right, or her voice was too monotonous,—Papa was always telling her to put more colour into her reading,—or something. The history itself could not be at fault.
"And, Peggy dear; don't think I want to be lecturing you all the time, but—these are things that one has to know something about, or one will appear uneducated, and you don't want to do that."
"I don't care. I don't see the use of this kind of education, Margaret, and that is just the truth. Ma never had any of what you call education,—she was a farmer's daughter, you know, and had always lived on the prairie,—and she has always got on well enough. Hugh talks just like you do—"
"Please, dear, as you do, not like."
"Well, as you do, then. He talks William the Conqueror and all those old fuddy-duddies by the yard, but he can't make me see the use of them, and you can't. Now if you would give me some mathematics; that is what I want. If you would give me some solid geometry, Margaret!"
But here poor Margaret hung her head and blushed, and confessed that she had no solid geometry to give. Her geometry had been fluid, or rather, vapourous, and had floated away, unthought of and unregretted.