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 to Arden in the hope that something might suggest itself; that
a gleam of sense might be shown by the one or the other of the lunatics
in gray for whose good I was racking my brains.
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