I'm getting old and selfish--that's the truth of
the matter. I want to sit here, and have my girls take care of me!
Pshaw!
"Sophie, now--well, perhaps she don't need it so much, yet; she's
younger than her sister, and has a good deal more internal resource:
besides, she's too delicate at present. But Neelie--Neelie ought to go
at once--this very summer. She needs an enormous deal of action and
excitement, bodily and mental both, to keep her in wholesome condition.
Has that same restless, feverish devil in her that I used to have; never
do to let it feed upon itself! must get her absorbed in outside things!
"But what am I to do?" resumed the professor, sitting up in his chair,
and shaking out his shirt-sleeves--for the heat of his meditations had
brought on a perspiration; "what can I do--eh? Sophie not in condition
to travel--can't leave her to take Cornelia--no one else to take
her--and she can't go alone, that's certain! Humph!"
Professor Valeyon paused in his soliloquy, like a man who has turned
into a closed court under the impression that it is a thoroughfare, and
stared down with upwrinkled forehead at the sole of the kicked-off
slipper, indulging the while in a mental calculation of how many days it
would take for the hole near the toe to work down to the hole under the
instep, and thus render problematical the possibility of keeping the
shoe on at all.
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