Poor dear Uncle Basil--he had tried preaching
religion to Sylvia many years ago, and never could do it because he
loved her so well that with all his Seventeenth Century theology he
could not deny her chance of salvation. Now the first sight that met
his eyes when he came to see her was his little blind grand-niece.
And also he had in his secret heart the knowledge that he, a rich
and gay young planter before he became converted to Methodism, had
played with the fire of vice, and been badly burned. So Sylvia did
not find him at all the Voice of Authority, but just a poor,
hen-pecked, unhappy husband of a tyrannous Castleman woman.
The next thing was that "Miss Margaret" took up the notion that a
time such as this was not one for Sylvia's husband to be away from
her. What if people were to say that they had separated? There were
family consultations, and in the midst of them there came word that
van Tuiver was called North upon business. When the family
delegations came to Sylvia, to insist that she go with him, the
answer they got was that if they could not let her stay quietly at
home without asking her any questions, she would go off to New York
and live with a divorced woman Socialist!
"Of course, they gave up," she wrote me.
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