“Do you think so, my Peggy? That is but a little way to travel to get sense. Where is sense to be found, and can you tell me the place of understanding? It would be easily learned if it could be got at twenty-five.”
“Oh, but twenty-five is a very good age, papa. Me— I am only seventeen.”
“And you think you have a good deal of sense already, and have found out whereabouts wisdom dwells?” said Sir Ludovic; “then, to be sure, in eight years more you will have gone a long way toward perfection.”
“Papa, you are making a fool of me again.”
“No, my dear, only admiring and wondering. It is such a long time since I was twenty-five; and I am not half so sure about a great many things as I was then. Perhaps you are right, my little Peggy; one changes one’s opinions often after—but it may be that just then you are at the crown of the brae. Far be it from me to pronounce a judgment. Dante puts it ten years later.”
“But what Dante means,” said Margaret, boldly—for, ignorant as she was, she had read translations of many things, even of the Divine Comedy, not having, perhaps, anything more amusing to read, which was the origin of most of the better knowledge she possessed—“what Dante means was the half of life, when it was half done.”
“Ay, ay, that was it,” said the old man, “half done! yet you see here I am, at seventy-five, still in everybody’s way.”
“Oh, papa,” she said, fixing upon him reproachful eyes which two tears flooded, brimming the crystal vessels over—“oh, papa!”
“Well, my Peggy; I wonder if it is the better for you that your old father should live on? Well, my dear, it’s better for some things. The old nest is gray, but it’s warm. Though Jean and Grace, you know—Jean and Grace, and even Mrs. Ludovic, my dear, all of them think it’s very bad for you. You would be better, they tell me, in a fine boarding-school in London.”
“Papa!”