I'm all ready; I'll pack
everything for you; we'll go to Newport; to Europe--anywhere, to
be out of his reach!"
With this passionate appeal, Sybil threw herself on her knees by
her sister's side, and, clasping her arms around Madeleine's waist,
sobbed as though her heart were already broken. Had Carrington
seen her then he must have admitted that she had carried out his
instructions to the letter. She was quite honest, too, in it all. She
meant what she said, and her tears were real tears that had been
pent up for weeks. Unluckily, her logic was feeble. Her idea of Mr.
Ratcliffe's character was vague, and biased by mere theories of
what a Prairie Giant of Peonia should be in his domestic relations.
Her idea of Peonia, too, was indistinct. She was haunted by a
vision of her sister, sitting on a horse-hair sofa before an air-tight
iron stove in a small room with high, bare white walls, a
chromolithograph on each, and at her side a marble-topped table
surmounted by a glass vase containing funereal dried grasses; the
only literature, Frank Leslie's periodical and the New York Ledger,
with a strong smell of cooking everywhere prevalent. Here she saw
Madeleine receiving visitors, the wives of neighbours and
constituents, who told her the Peonia news.
Notwithstanding her ignorant and unreasonable prejudice against
western men and women, western towns and prairies, and, in short,
everything western, down to western politics and western
politicians, whom she perversely asserted to be tue lowest ot all
western products, there was still some common sense in Sybil's
idea.
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