Long-cherished purposes and habits of thought in regard
to Miss Lou, then panic, and strong emotions mixed with good and
evil, had brought the girl's relatives into their present false
relations to her. After the scene at the attempted wedding, Mrs.
Whately would have returned to safe and proper ground, hoping still
to win by kindness and coaxing. She had learned that Miss Lou was
not that kind of girl, who more or less reluctantly could be urged
into marriage and then make the best of it as a matter of course.
This fact only made her the more eager for the union, because by
means of it she hoped to secure a balance-wheel for her son. But the
blind, obstinate persistence on the part of the Barons in their
habitual attitude toward their niece, and now her son's action, had
placed them all in a most humiliating light. Even Mr. Baron, who had
always been so infallible in his autocratic ways and beliefs, knew
not how to answer the elderly major. Whately himself, in a revulsion
of feeling common to his nature, felt that his cousin had been
right, and that a miserable space for repentance was before him, not
so much for the wrong he had purposed, as for the woful unwisdom of
his tactics and their ignominious failure.
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