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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12224 ***
+
+[Illustration: BINDING THE RINGS.]
+
+
+WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY
+
+By
+
+MRS. A.D.T. WHITNEY
+
+
+AUTHOR OF "FAITH GARTNEY'S GIRLHOOD," "THE GAYWORTHYS,"
+"A SUMMER IN LESLIE GOLDTHWAITE'S LIFE," ETC.
+
+WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.
+
+
+BOSTON
+1870, 1890
+
+
+
+    CONTENTS.
+
+    CHAPTER I. THE STORY BEGINS
+    CHAPTER II. AMPHIBIOUS
+    CHAPTER III. BETWIXT AND BETWEEN
+    CHAPTER IV. NEXT THINGS
+    CHAPTER V. THE "BACK YETT AJEE."
+    CHAPTER VI. CO-OPERATING
+    CHAPTER VII. SPRINKLES AND GUSTS
+    CHAPTER VIII. HALLOWEEN
+    CHAPTER IX. WINTER NIGHTS AND WINTER DAYS.
+    CHAPTER X. RUTH'S RESPONSIBILITY.
+    CHAPTER XI. BARBARA'S BUZZ.
+    CHAPTER XII. EMERGENCIES.
+
+
+
+WE GIRLS: A HOME STORY.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+THE STORY BEGINS.
+
+
+It begins right in the middle; but a story must begin somewhere.
+
+The town is down below the hill.
+
+It lies in the hollow, and stretches on till it runs against another
+hill, over opposite; up which it goes a little way before it can stop
+itself, just as it does on this side.
+
+It is no matter for the name of the town. It is a good, large
+country town,--in fact, it has some time since come under city
+regulations,--thinking sufficiently well of itself, and, for that
+which it lacks, only twenty miles from the metropolis.
+
+Up our hill straggle the more ambitious houses, that have shaken off
+the dust from their feet, or their foundations, and surrounded
+themselves with green grass, and are shaded with trees, and are called
+"places." There are the Marchbanks places, and the "Haddens," and the
+old Pennington place. At these houses they dine at five o'clock, when
+the great city bankers and merchants come home in the afternoon train;
+down in the town, where people keep shops, or doctors' or lawyers'
+offices, or manage the Bank, and where the manufactories are, they eat
+at one, and have long afternoons; and the schools keep twice a day.
+
+We lived in the town--that is, Mr. and Mrs. Holabird did, and their
+children, for such length of the time as their ages allowed--for
+nineteen years; and then we moved to Westover, and this story began.
+
+They called it "Westover," more or less, years and years before; when
+there were no houses up the hill at all; only farm lands and pastures,
+and a turnpike road running straight up one side and down the other,
+in the sun. When anybody had need to climb over the crown, to get to
+the fields on this side, they called it "going west over"; and so came
+the name.
+
+We always thought it was a pretty, sunsetty name; but it isn't
+considered quite so fine to have a house here as to have it below the
+brow. When you get up sufficiently high, in any sense, you begin to go
+down again. Or is it that people can't be distinctively genteel, if
+they get so far away from the common as no longer to well overlook it?
+
+Grandfather Holabird--old Mr. Rufus,--I don't say whether he was my
+grandfather or not, for it doesn't matter which Holabird tells this
+story, or whether it is a Holabird at all--bought land here ever so
+many years ago, and built a large, plain, roomy house; and here the
+boys grew up,--Roderick and Rufus and Stephen and John.
+
+Roderick went into the manufactory with his father,--who had himself
+come up from being a workman to being owner,--and learned the
+business, and made money, and married a Miss Bragdowne from C----, and
+lived on at home. Rufus married and went away, and died when he was
+yet a young man. His wife went home to her family, and there were no
+little children. John lives in New York, and has two sons and three
+daughters.
+
+There are of us--Stephen Holabird's family--just six. Stephen and his
+wife, Rosamond and Barbara and little Stephen and Ruth. Ruth is Mrs.
+Holabird's niece, and Mr. Holabird's second cousin; for two cousins
+married two sisters. She came here when she had neither father nor
+mother left. They thought it queer up at the other house; because
+"Stephen had never managed to have any too much for his own"; but of
+course, being the wife's niece, they never thought of interfering, on
+the mere claim of the common cousinship.
+
+Ruth Holabird is a quiet little body, but she has her own particular
+ways too.
+
+There is one thing different in our house from most others. We are all
+known by our straight names. I say _known_; because we do have little
+pet ways of calling, among ourselves,--sometimes one way and sometimes
+another; but we don't let these get out of doors much. Mr. Holabird
+doesn't like it. So though up stairs, over our sewing, or our
+bed-making, or our dressing, we shorten or sweeten, or make a little
+fun,--though Rose of the world gets translated, if she looks or
+behaves rather specially nice, or stays at the glass trying to do the
+first,--or Barbara gets only "Barb" when she is sharper than common,
+or Stephen is "Steve" when he's a dear, and "Stiff" when he's
+obstinate,--we always _introduce_ "my daughter Rosamond," or "my
+sister Barbara," or,--but Ruth of course never gets nicknamed, because
+nothing could be easier or pleasanter than just "Ruth,"--and Stephen
+is plain strong Stephen, because he is a boy and is expected to be a
+man some time. Nobody writes to us, or speaks of us, except as we were
+christened. This is only rather a pity for Rosamond. Rose Holabird is
+such a pretty name. "But it will keep," her mother tells her. "She
+wouldn't want to be everybody's Rose."
+
+Our moving to Westover was a great time.
+
+That was because we had to move the house; which is what everybody
+does not do who moves into a house by any means.
+
+We were very much astonished when Grandfather Holabird came in and
+told us, one morning, of his having bought it,--the empty Beaman
+house, that nobody had lived in for five years. The Haddens had bought
+the land for somebody in their family who wanted to come out and
+build, and so the old house was to be sold and moved away; and nobody
+but old Mr. Holabird owned land near enough to put it upon. For it was
+large and solid-built, and could not be taken far.
+
+We were a great deal more astonished when he came in again, another
+day, and proposed that we should go and live in it.
+
+We were all a good deal afraid of Grandfather Holabird. He had very
+strict ideas of what people ought to do about money. Or rather of what
+they ought to do _without_ it, when they didn't happen to have any.
+
+Mrs. Stephen pulled down the green blinds when she saw him coming that
+day,--him and his cane. Barbara said she didn't exactly know which it
+was she dreaded; she thought she could bear the cane without him, or
+even him without the cane; but both together were "_scare-mendous_;
+they did put down so."
+
+Mrs. Holabird pulled down the blinds, because he would be sure to
+notice the new carpet the first thing; it was a cheap ingrain, and the
+old one had been all holes, so that Barbara had proposed putting up a
+board at the door,--"Private way; dangerous passing." And we had all
+made over our three winters' old cloaks this year, for the sake of it:
+and we hadn't got the carpet then till the winter was half over. But
+we couldn't tell all this to Grandfather Holabird. There was never
+time for the whole of it. And he knew that Mr. Stephen was troubled
+just now for his rent and taxes. For Stephen Holabird was the one in
+this family who couldn't make, or couldn't manage, money. There is
+always one. I don't know but it is usually the best one of all, in
+other ways.
+
+Stephen Holabird is a good man, kind and true; loving to live a
+gentle, thoughtful life, in his home and among his books; not made for
+the din and scramble of business.
+
+He never looks to his father; his father does not believe in allowing
+his sons to look to him; so in the terrible time of '57, when the loss
+and the worry came, he had to struggle as long as he could, and then
+go down with the rest, paying sixty cents on the dollar of all his
+debts, and beginning again, to try and earn the forty, and to feed and
+clothe his family meanwhile.
+
+Grandfather Holabird sent us down all our milk, and once a week, when
+he bought his Sunday dinner, he would order a turkey for us. In the
+summer, we had all the vegetables we wanted from his garden, and at
+Thanksgiving a barrel of cranberries from his meadow. But these
+obliged us to buy an extra half-barrel of sugar. For all these things
+we made separate small change of thanks, each time, and were all the
+more afraid of his noticing our new gowns or carpets.
+
+"When you haven't any money, don't buy anything," was his stern
+precept.
+
+"When you're in the Black Hole, don't breathe," Barbara would say,
+after he was gone.
+
+But then we thought a good deal of Grandfather Holabird, for all. That
+day, when he came in and astonished us so, we were all as busy and as
+cosey as we could be.
+
+Mrs. Holabird was making a rug of the piece of the new carpet that had
+been cut out for the hearth, bordering it with a strip of shag.
+Rosamond was inventing a feather for her hat out of the best of an old
+black-cock plume, and some bits of beautiful downy white ones with
+smooth tips, that she brought forth out of a box.
+
+"What are they, Rose? And where did you get them?" Ruth asked,
+wondering.
+
+"They were dropped,--and I picked them up," Rosamond answered,
+mysteriously. "The owner never missed them."
+
+"Why, Rosamond!" cried Stephen, looking up from his Latin grammar.
+
+"Did!" persisted Rosamond. "And would again. I'm sure I wanted 'em
+most. Hens lay themselves out on their underclothing, don't they?" she
+went on, quietly, putting the white against the black, and admiring
+the effect. "They don't dress much outside."
+
+"O, hens! What did you make us think it was people for?"
+
+"Don't you ever let anybody know it was hens! Never cackle about
+contrivances. Things mustn't be contrived; they must happen. Woman and
+her accidents,--mine are usually catastrophes."
+
+Rosamond was so busy fastening in the plume, and giving it the right
+set-up, that she talked a little delirium of nonsense.
+
+Barbara flung down a magazine,--some old number.
+
+"Just as they were putting the very tassel on to the cap of the
+climax, the page is torn out! What do you want, little cat?" she went
+on to her pussy, that had tumbled out of her lap as she got up, and
+was stretching and mewing. "Want to go out doors and play, little cat?
+Well, you can. There's plenty of room out of doors for two little
+cats!" And going to the door with her, she met grandfather and the
+cane coming in.
+
+There was time enough for Mrs. Holabird to pull down the blinds, and
+for Ruth to take a long, thinking look out from under hers, through
+the sash of window left unshaded; for old Mr. Holabird and his cane
+were slow; the more awful for that.
+
+Ruth thought to herself, "Yes; there is plenty of room out of doors;
+and yet people crowd so! I wonder why we can't live bigger!"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Mrs. Holabird's thinking was something like it.
+
+"Five hundred dollars to worry about, for what is set down upon a few
+square yards of 'out of doors.' And inside of that, a great contriving
+and going without, to put something warm underfoot over the sixteen
+square feet that we live on most!"
+
+She had almost a mind to pull up the blinds again; it was such a very
+little matter, the bit of new carpet, after all.
+
+"How do I know what they were thinking?" Never mind. People do know,
+or else how do they ever tell stories? We know lots of things that we
+_don't_ tell all the time. We don't stop to think whether we know
+them or not; but they are underneath the things we feel, and the
+things we do.
+
+Grandfather came in, and said over the same old stereotypes. He had a
+way of saying them, so that we knew just what was coming, sentence
+after sentence. It was a kind of family psalter. What it all meant
+was, "I've looked in to see you, and how you are getting along. I do
+think of you once in a while." And our worn-out responses were, "It's
+very good of you, and we're much obliged to you, as far as it goes."
+
+It was only just as he got up to leave that he said the real thing.
+When there was one, he always kept it to the last.
+
+"Your lease is up here in May, isn't it, Mrs. Stephen?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"I'm going to move over that Beaman house next month, as soon as the
+around settles. I thought it might suit you, perhaps, to come and live
+in it. It would be handier about a good many things than it is now.
+Stephen might do something to his piece, in a way of small farming.
+I'd let him have the rent for three years. You can talk it over."
+
+He turned round and walked right out. Nobody thanked him or said a
+word. We were too much surprised.
+
+Mother spoke first; after we had hushed up Stephen, who shouted.
+
+I shall call her "mother," now; for it always seems as if that were a
+woman's real name among her children. Mr. Holabird was apt to call her
+so himself. She did not altogether like it, always, from him. She
+asked him once if "Emily" were dead and buried. She had tried to keep
+her name herself, she said; that was the reason she had not given it
+to either of her daughters. It was a good thing to leave to a
+grandchild; but she could not do without it as long as she lived.
+
+"We could keep a cow!" said mother.
+
+"We could have a pony!" cried Stephen, utterly disregarded.
+
+"What does he want to move it quite over for?" asked Rosamond. "His
+land begins this side."
+
+"Rosamond wants so to get among the Hill people! Pray, why can't we
+have a colony of our own?" said Barbara, sharply and proudly.
+
+"I should think it would be less trouble," said Rosamond, quietly, in
+continuation of her own remark; holding up, as she spoke, her finished
+hat upon her hand. Rosamond aimed at being truly elegant. She would
+never discuss, directly, any questions of our position, or our
+limitations.
+
+"Does that look--"
+
+"Holabirdy?" put in Barbara. "No. Not a bit. Things that you do never
+do."
+
+Rosamond felt herself flush up. Alice Marchbanks had said once, of
+something that we wore, which was praised as pretty, that it "might
+be, but it was Holabirdy." Rosamond found it hard to forget that.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Rose. It's just as pretty as it can be; and I
+don't mean to tease you," said Barbara, quickly. "But _I do_ mean to
+be proud of being Holabirdy, just as long as there's a piece of the
+name left."
+
+"I wish we hadn't bought the new carpet now," said mother. "And what
+_shall_ we do about all those other great rooms? It will take ready
+money to move. I'm afraid we shall have to cut it off somewhere else
+for a while. What if it should be the music, Ruth?"
+
+That did go to Ruth's heart. She tried so hard to be willing that she
+did not speak at first.
+
+"'Open and shet is a sign of more wet!'" cried Barbara. "I don't
+believe there ever was a family that had so _much_ opening and
+shetting! We just get a little squeak out of a crack, and it goes
+together again and snips our noses!"
+
+"What _is_ a 'squeak' out of a crack?" said Rosamond, laughing. "A
+mouse pinched in it, I should think."
+
+"Exactly," replied Barbara. "The most expressive words are
+fricassees,--heads and tails dished up together. Can't you see the
+philology of it? 'Squint' and 'peek.' Worcester can't put down
+everything. He leaves something to human ingenuity. The language isn't
+all made,--or used,--yet!"
+
+Barbara had a way of putting heads and tails together, in defiance--in
+aid, as she maintained--of the dictionaries.
+
+"O, I can practise," Ruth said, cheerily. "It will be so bright out
+there, and the mornings will be so early!"
+
+"That's just what they won't be, particularly," said Barbara, "seeing
+we're going 'west over.'"
+
+"Well, then, the afternoons will be long. It is all the same," said
+Ruth. That was the best she could do.
+
+"Mother," said Rosamond, "I've been thinking. Get grandfather to have
+some of the floors stained. I think rugs, and English druggets, put
+down with brass-headed nails, in the middle, are delightful.
+Especially for a country house."
+
+"It seems, then, we _are_ going?"
+
+Nobody had even raised a question of that.
+
+Nobody raised a question when Mr. Holabird came in. He himself raised
+none. He sat and listened to all the propositions and corollaries,
+quite as one does go through the form of demonstration of a
+geometrical fact patent at first glance.
+
+"We can have a cow," mother repeated.
+
+"Or a dog, at any rate," put in Stephen, who found it hard to get a
+hearing.
+
+"You can have a garden, father," said Barbara. "It's to be near to the
+parcel of ground that Rufus gave to his son Stephen."
+
+"I don't like to have you quote Scripture so," said father, gravely.
+
+"I don't," said Barbara. "It quoted itself. And it isn't there either.
+I don't know of a Rufus in all sacred history. And there aren't many
+in profane."
+
+"Somebody was the 'father of Alexander and Rufus'; and there's a Rufus
+'saluted' at the end of an epistle."
+
+"Ruth is sure to catch one, if one's out in Scripture. But that isn't
+history; that's mere mention."
+
+"We can ask the girls to come 'over' now, instead of 'down,'"
+suggested Rosamond, complacently.
+
+Barbara smiled.
+
+"And we can tell _the girl_ to come 'over,' instead of 'up,' when
+she's to fetch us home from a tea-drinking That will be one of the
+'handy' things."
+
+"Girl! we shall have a man, if we have a garden." This was between
+the two.
+
+"Mayhap," said Barbara. "And perlikely a wheel-barrow."
+
+"We shall all have to remember that it will only be living there
+instead of here," said father, cautiously, putting up an umbrella
+under the rain of suggestion.
+
+The umbrella settled the question of the weather, however. There was
+no doubt about it after that. Mother calculated measurements, and it
+was found out, between her and the girls, that the six muslin curtains
+in our double town parlor would be lovely for the six windows in the
+square Beaman best room. Also that the parlor carpet would make over,
+and leave pieces for rugs for some of our delightful stained floors.
+The little tables, and the two or three brackets, and the few
+pictures, and other art-ornaments, that only "strinkled," Barbara
+said, in two rooms, would be charmingly "crowsy" in one. And up stairs
+there would be such nice space for cushioning and flouncing, and
+making upholstery out of nothing, that you couldn't do here, because
+in these spyglass houses the sleeping-rooms were all bedstead, and
+fireplace, and closet doors.
+
+They were left to their uninterrupted feminine speculations, for Mr.
+Holabird had put on his hat and coat again, and gone off west over to
+see his father; and Stephen had "piled" out into the kitchen, to
+communicate his delight to Winifred, with whom he was on terms of a
+kind of odd-glove intimacy, neither of them having in the house any
+precisely matched companionship.
+
+This ought to have been foreseen, and an embargo put on; for it led
+to trouble. By the time the green holland shades were apportioned to
+their new places, and an approximate estimate reached of the whole
+number of windows to be provided, Winny had made up her gregarious
+mind that she could not give up her town connection, and go out to
+live in "sûch a fersaakunness"; and as any remainder of time is to
+Irish valuation like the broken change of a dollar, when the whole can
+no longer be counted on, she gave us warning next morning at breakfast
+that she "must jûst be lukkin out fer a plaashe."
+
+"But," said mother, in her most conciliatory way, "it must be two or
+three months, Winny, before we move, if we do go; and I should be glad
+to have you stay and help us through."
+
+"Ah, sure, I'd do annything to hilp yiz through; an' I'm sure, I taks
+an intheresht in yiz ahl, down to the little cat hersel'; an' indeed I
+niver tuk an intheresht in anny little cat but that little cat; but I
+couldn't go live where it wud be so loahnsome, an' I can't be out oo a
+plaashe, ye see."
+
+It was no use talking; it was only transposing sentences; she "tuk a
+graat intheresht in us, an' sure she'd do annything to hilp us, but
+she mûst jûst be lukkin out fer hersel'." And that very day she had
+the kitchen scrubbed up at a most unwonted hour, and her best bonnet
+on,--a rim of flowers and lace, with a wide expanse--of ungarnished
+head between it and the chignon it was supposed to accommodate,--and
+took her "afternoon out" to search for some new situation, where
+people were subject neither to sickness nor removals nor company nor
+children nor much of anything; and where, under these circumstances,
+and especially if there were "set tubs, and hot and cold water," she
+would probably remain just about as long as her "intheresht" would
+_not_ allow of her continuing with us.
+
+A kitchen exodus is like other small natural commotions,--sure to
+happen when anything greater does. When the sun crosses the line we
+have a gale down below.
+
+"_Now_ what shall we do?" asked Mrs. Holabird, forlornly, coming back
+into the sitting-room out of that vacancy in the farther apartments
+which spreads itself in such a still desertedness of feeling all
+through the house.
+
+"Just what we've done before, motherums!" said Barbara, more bravely
+than she felt. "The next one is somewhere. Like Tupper's 'wife of thy
+youth,' she must be 'now living upon the earth.' In fact, I don't
+doubt there's a long line of them yet, threaded in and out among the
+rest of humanity, all with faces set by fate toward our back door.
+There's always a coming woman, in that direction at least."
+
+"I would as lief come across the staying one," said Mrs. Holabird,
+with meekness.
+
+It cooled down our enthusiasm. Stephen, especially, was very much
+quenched.
+
+The next one was not only somewhere, but everywhere, it seemed, and
+nowhere. "Everything by turns and nothing long," Barbara wrote up over
+the kitchen chimney with the baker's chalk. We had five girls between
+that time and our moving to Westover, and we had to move without a
+girl at last; only getting a woman in to do days' work. But I have not
+come to the family-moving yet.
+
+The house-moving was the pretty part. Every pleasant afternoon, while
+the building was upon the rollers, we walked over, and went up into
+all the rooms, and looked out of every window, noting what new
+pictures they gave as the position changed from day to day; how now
+this tree and now that shaded them: how we gradually came to see by
+the end of the Haddens' barn, and at last across it,--for the slope,
+though gradual, was long,--and how the sunset came in more and more,
+as we squared toward the west; and there was always a thrill of
+excitement when we felt under us, as we did again and again, the
+onward momentary surge of the timbers, as the workmen brought all
+rightly to bear, and the great team of oxen started up. Stephen called
+these earthquakes.
+
+We found places, day by day, where it would be nice to stop. It was
+such a funny thing to travel along in a house that might stop
+anywhere, and thenceforward belong. Only, in fact, it couldn't;
+because, like some other things that seem a matter of choice, it was
+all pre-ordained; and there was a solid stone foundation waiting over
+on the west side, where grandfather meant it to be.
+
+We got little new peeps at the southerly hills, in the fresh breaks
+between trees and buildings that we went by. As we reached the broad,
+open crown, we saw away down beyond where it was still and woodsy; and
+the nice farm-fields of Grandfather Holabird's place looked sunny and
+pleasant and real countrified.
+
+It was not a steep eminence on either side; if it had been the great
+house could not have been carried over as it was. It was a grand
+generous swell of land, lifting up with a slow serenity into pure airs
+and splendid vision. We did not know, exactly, where the highest
+point had been; but as we came on toward the little walled-in
+excavation which seemed such a small mark to aim at, and one which we
+might so easily fail to hit after all, we saw how behind us rose the
+green bosom of the field against the sky, and how, day by day, we got
+less of the great town within our view as we settled down upon our
+side of the ridge.
+
+The air was different here, it was full of hill and pasture.
+
+There were not many trees immediately about the spot where we were to
+be; but a great group of ashes and walnuts stood a little way down
+against the roadside, and all around in the far margins of the fields
+were beautiful elms, and round maples that would be globes of fire in
+autumn days, and above was the high blue glory of the unobstructed
+sky.
+
+The ground fell off suddenly into a great hill-dimple, just where the
+walls were laid; that was why Grandfather Holabird had chosen the
+spot. There could be a cellar-kitchen; and it had been needful for the
+moving, that all the rambling, outrunning L, which had held the
+kitchens and woodsheds before, should be cut off and disposed of as
+mere lumber. It was only the main building--L-shaped still, of three
+very large rooms below and five by more subdivision above--which had
+majestically taken up its line of march, like the star of empire,
+westward. All else that was needful must be rebuilt.
+
+Mother did not like a cellar-kitchen. It would be inconvenient with
+one servant. But Grandfather Holabird had planned the house before he
+offered it to us to live in. What we were going to save in rent we
+must take out cheerfully in extra steps.
+
+It was in the bright, lengthening days of April, when the bluebirds
+came fluttering out of fairy-land, that the old house finally stopped,
+and stood staring around it with its many eyes,--wide open to the
+daylight, all its green winkers having been taken off,--to see where
+it was and was likely to be for the rest of its days. It had a very
+knowing look, we thought, like a house that had seen the world.
+
+The sun walked round it graciously, if not inquisitively. He flashed
+in at the wide parlor windows and the rooms overhead, as soon as he
+got his brow above the hill-top. Then he seemed to sidle round
+southward, not slanting wholly out his morning cheeriness until the
+noonday glory slanted in. At the same time he began with the
+sitting-room opposite, through the one window behind; and then through
+the long, glowing afternoon, the whole bright west let him in along
+the full length of the house, till he just turned the last corner, and
+peeped in, on the longest summer days, at the very front. This was
+what he had got so far as to do by the time we moved in,--as if he
+stretched his very neck to find out the last there was to learn about
+it, and whether nowhere in it were really yet any human life. He
+quieted down in his mind, I suppose, when from morning to night he
+found somebody to beam at, and a busy doing in every room. He took it
+serenely then, as one of the established things upon the earth, and
+put us in the regular list of homes upon his round, that he was to
+leave so many cubic feet of light at daily.
+
+I think he _might_ like to look in at that best parlor. With the six
+snowy-curtained windows, it was like a great white blossom; and the
+deep-green carpet and the walls with vine-leaves running all over
+them, in the graceful-patterned paper that Rosamond chose, were like
+the moss and foliage among which it sprung. Here and there the light
+glinted upon gilded frame or rich bronze or pure Parian, and threw out
+the lovely high tints, and deepened the shadowy effects, of our few
+fine pictures. We had little of art, but that little was choice. It
+was Mr. Holabird's weakness, when money was easy with him, to bring
+home straws like these to the home nest. So we had, also, a good many
+nice books; for, one at a time, when there was no hurrying bill to be
+paid, they had not seemed much to buy; and in our brown room, where we
+sat every day, and where our ivies had kindly wonted themselves
+already to the broad, bright windows, there were stands and cases well
+filled, and a great round family table in the middle, whose worn cloth
+hid its shabbiness under the comfort of delicious volumes ready to the
+hand, among which, central of all, stood the Shekinah of the
+home-spirit,--a tall, large-globed lamp that drew us cosily into its
+round of radiance every night.
+
+Not these June nights though. I will tell you presently what the June
+nights were at Westover.
+
+We worked hard in those days, but we were right blithe about it. We
+had at last got an Irish girl from "far down,"--that is their word for
+the north country at home, and the north country is where the best
+material comes from,--who was willing to air her ignorance in our
+kitchen, and try our Christian patience, during a long pupilage, for
+the modest sum of three dollars a week; than which "she could not
+come indeed for less," said the friend who brought her. "All the girls
+was gettin' that." She had never seen dipped toast, and she "couldn't
+do starched clothes very skilful"; but these things had nothing to do
+with established rates of wages.
+
+But who cared, when it was June, and the smell of green grass and the
+singing of birds were in the air, and everything indoors was clean,
+and fresh with the wonderful freshness of things set every one in a
+new place? We worked hard and we made it look lovely, if the things
+were old; and every now and then we stopped in the midst of a busy
+rush, at door or window, to see joyfully and exclaim with ecstasy how
+grandly and exquisitely Nature was furbishing up her beautiful old
+things also,--a million for one sweet touches outside, for ours in.
+
+"Westover is no longer an adverbial phrase, even qualifying the verb
+'to go,'" said Barbara, exultingly, looking abroad upon the family
+settlement, to which our new barn, rising up, added another building.
+"It is an undoubted substantive proper, and takes a preposition before
+it, except when it is in the nominative case."
+
+Because of the cellar-kitchen, there was a high piazza built up to the
+sitting-room windows on the west, which gradually came to the
+ground-level along the front. Under this was the woodshed. The piazza
+was open, unroofed: only at the front door was a wide covered portico,
+from which steps went down to the gravelled entrance. A light low
+railing ran around the whole.
+
+Here we had those blessed country hours of day-done, when it was right
+and lawful to be openly idle in this world, and to look over through
+the beautiful evening glooms to neighbor worlds, that showed always a
+round of busy light, and yet seemed somehow to keep holiday-time with
+us, and to be only out at play in the spacious ether.
+
+We used to think of the sunset all the day through, wondering what new
+glory it would spread for us, and gathering eagerly to see, as for the
+witnessing of a pageant.
+
+The moon was young, for our first delight; and the evening planet hung
+close by; they dropped down through the gold together, till they
+touched the very rim of the farthest possible horizon; when they slid
+silently beneath, we caught our suspended breath.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"But the curtain isn't down," said Barbara, after a hush.
+
+No. The great scene was all open, still. Wide from north to south
+stretched the deep, sweet heaven, full of the tenderest tints and
+softliest creeping shadows; the tree-fringes stood up against it; the
+gentle winds swept through, as if creatures winged, invisible, went
+by; touched, one by one, with glory, the stars burned on the blue; we
+watched as if any new, unheard-of wonder might appear; we looked out
+into great depths that narrow daylight shut us in from. Daylight was
+the curtain.
+
+"We've got the best balcony seats, haven't we, father?" Barbara said
+again, coming to where Mr. Holabird sat, and leaning against the
+railing.
+
+"The front row, and season tickets!"
+
+"Every one, all summer. Only think!" said Ruth.
+
+"Pho! You'll get used to it," answered Stephen, as if he knew human
+nature, and had got used himself to most things.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+AMPHIBIOUS.
+
+
+"What day of the month is it?" asked Mrs. Holabird, looking up from
+her letter.
+
+Ruth told.
+
+"How do you always know the day of the month?" said Rosamond. "You are
+as pat as the almanac. I have to stop and think whether anything
+particular has happened, to remember _any_ day by, since the first,
+and then count up. So, as things don't happen much out here, I'm never
+sure of anything except that it can't be more than the thirty-first;
+and as to whether it can be that, I have to say over the old rhyme in
+my head."
+
+"I know how she tells," spoke up Stephen. "It's that thing up in her
+room,--that pious thing that whops over. It has the figures down at
+the bottom; and she whops it every morning."
+
+Ruth laughed.
+
+"What do you try to tease her for?" said Mrs. Holabird.
+
+"It doesn't tease her. She thinks it's funny. She laughed, and you
+only puckered."
+
+Ruth laughed again. "It wasn't only that," she said.
+
+"Well, what then?"
+
+"To think you knew."
+
+"Knew! Why shouldn't I know? It's big enough."
+
+"Yes,--but about the whopping. And the figures are the smallest part
+of the difference. You're a pretty noticing boy, Steve."
+
+Steve colored a little, and his eye twinkled. He saw that Ruth had
+caught him out.
+
+"I guess you set it for a goody-trap," he said. "Folks can't help
+reading sign-boards when they go by. And besides, it's like the man
+that went to Van Amburgh's. I shall catch you forgetting, some fine
+day, and then I'll whop the whole over for you."
+
+Ruth had been mending stockings, and was just folding up the last
+pair. She did not say any more, for she did not want to tease Stephen
+in her turn; but there was a little quiet smile just under her lips
+that she kept from pulling too hard at the corners, as she got up and
+went away with them to her room.
+
+She stopped when she got to the open door of it, with her basket in
+her hand, and looked in from the threshold at the hanging scroll of
+Scripture texts printed in large clear letters,--a sheet for each day
+of the month,--and made to fold over and drop behind the black-walnut
+rod to which they were bound. It had been given her by her teacher at
+the Bible Class,--Mrs. Ingleside; and Ruth loved Mrs. Ingleside very
+much.
+
+Then she went to her bureau, and put her stockings in their drawer,
+and set the little basket, with its cotton-ball and darner, and
+maplewood egg, and small sharp scissors, on the top; and then she went
+and sat down by the window, in her white considering-chair.
+
+For she had something to think about this morning.
+
+Ruth's room had three doors. It was the middle room up stairs, in the
+beginning of the L. Mrs. Holabird's opened into it from the front, and
+just opposite her door another led into the large, light corner room
+at the end, which Rosamond and Barbara occupied. Stephen's was on the
+other side of the three-feet passage which led straight through from
+the front staircase to the back of the house. The front staircase was
+a broad, low-stepped, old-fashioned one, with a landing half-way up;
+and it was from this landing that a branch half-flight came into the
+L, between these two smaller bedrooms. Now I have begun, I may as well
+tell you all about it; for, if you are like me, you will be glad to be
+taken fairly into a house you are to pay a visit in, and find out all
+the pleasantnesses of it, and whom they especially belong to.
+
+Ruth's room was longest across the house, and Stephen's with it;
+behind his was only the space taken by some closets and the square of
+staircase beyond. This staircase had landings also, and was lighted by
+a window high up in the wall. Behind Ruth's, as I have said, was the
+whole depth of a large apartment. But as the passage divided the L
+unequally, it gave the rooms similar space and shape, only at right
+angles to each other.
+
+The sun came into Stephen's room in the morning, and into Ruth's in
+the afternoon; in the middle of the day the passage was one long
+shine, from its south window at the end, right through,--except in
+such days as these, that were too deep in the summer to bear it, and
+then the green blinds were shut all around, and the warm wind drew
+through pleasantly in a soft shade.
+
+When we brought our furniture from the house in the town, the large
+front rooms and the open halls used it up so, that it seemed as if
+there were hardly anything left but bedsteads and washstands and
+bureaus,--the very things that make up-stairs look so _very_ bedroomy.
+And we wanted pretty places to sit in, as girls always do. Rosamond
+and Barbara made a box-sofa, fitted luxuriously with old pew-cushions
+sewed together, and a crib mattress cut in two and fashioned into seat
+and pillows; and a packing-case dressing-table, flounced with a skirt
+of white cross-barred muslin that Ruth had outgrown. In exchange for
+this Ruth bargained for the dimity curtains that had furnished their
+two windows before, and would not do for the three they had now.
+
+Then she shut herself up one day in her room, and made them all go
+round by the hall and passage, back and forth; and worked away
+mysteriously till the middle of the afternoon, when she unfastened all
+the doors again and set them wide, as they have for the most part
+remained ever since, in the daytimes; thus rendering Ruth's doings and
+ways particularly patent to the household, and most conveniently open
+to the privilege and second sight of story-telling.
+
+The white dimity curtains--one pair of them--were up at the wide west
+window; the other pair was cut up and made over into three or four
+things,--drapery for a little old pine table that had come to light
+among attic lumber, upon which she had tacked it in neat plaitings
+around the sides, and overlapped it at the top with a plain hemmed
+cover of the same; a great discarded toilet-cushion freshly encased
+with more of it, and edged with magic ruffling; the stained top and
+tied-up leg of a little disabled teapoy, kindly disguised in
+uniform,--varied only with a narrow stripe of chintz trimming in
+crimson arabesque,--made pretty with piles of books, and the Scripture
+scroll hung above it with its crimson cord and tassels; and in the
+window what she called afterward her "considering-chair," and in which
+she sat this morning; another antique, clothed purely from head to
+foot and made comfortable beneath with stout bagging nailed across,
+over the deficient cane-work.
+
+Tin tacks and some considerable machining--for mother had lent her the
+help of her little "common sense" awhile--had done it all; and Ruth's
+room, with its oblong of carpet,--which Mrs. Holabird and she had made
+out before, from the brightest breadths of her old dove-colored one
+and a bordering of crimson Venetian, of which there had not been
+enough to put upon the staircase,--looked, as Barbara said, "just as
+if it had been done on purpose."
+
+"It _says_ it all, anyhow, doesn't it?" said Ruth.
+
+Ruth was delightedly satisfied with it,--with its situation above all;
+she liked to nestle in, in the midst of people; and she never minded
+their coming through, any more than they minded her slipping her three
+little brass bolts when she had a desire to.
+
+She sat down in her considering-chair to-day, to think about Adelaide
+Marchbanks's invitation.
+
+The two Marchbanks houses were very gay this summer. The married
+daughter of one family--Mrs. Reyburne--was at home from New York, and
+had brought a very fascinating young Mrs. Van Alstyne with her. Roger
+Marchbanks, at the other house, had a couple of college friends
+visiting him; and both places were merry with young girls,--several
+sisters in each family,--always. The Haddens were there a good deal,
+and there were people from the city frequently, for a few days at a
+time. Mrs. Linceford was staying at the Haddens, and Leslie
+Goldthwaite, a great pet of hers,--Mr. Aaron Goldthwaite's daughter,
+in the town,--was often up among them all.
+
+The Holabirds were asked in to tea-drinkings, and to croquet, now and
+then, especially at the Haddens', whom they knew best; but they were
+not on "in and out" terms, from morning to night, as these others were
+among themselves; for one thing, the little daily duties of their life
+would not allow it. The "jolly times" on the Hill were a kind of
+Elf-land to them, sometimes patent and free, sometimes shrouded in the
+impalpable and impassable mist that shuts in the fairy region when it
+wills to be by itself for a time.
+
+There was one little simple sesame which had a power this way for
+them, perhaps without their thinking of it; certainly it was not
+spoken of directly when the invitations were given and accepted.
+Ruth's fingers had a little easy, gladsome knack at music; and I
+suppose sometimes it was only Ruth herself who realized how
+thoroughly the fingers earned the privilege of the rest of her bodily
+presence. She did not mind; she was as happy playing as Rosamond and
+Barbara dancing; it was all fair enough; everybody must be wanted for
+something; and Ruth knew that her music was her best thing. She wished
+and meant it to be; Ruth had plans in her head which her fingers were
+to carry out.
+
+But sometimes there was a slight flavor in attention, that was not
+quite palatable, even to Ruth's pride. These three girls had each her
+own sort of dignity. Rosamond's measured itself a good deal by the
+accepted dignity of others; Barbara's insisted on its own standard;
+why shouldn't they--the Holabirds--settle anything? Ruth hated to have
+theirs hurt; and she did not like subserviency, or courting favor. So
+this morning she was partly disturbed and partly puzzled by what had
+happened.
+
+Adelaide Marchbanks had overtaken her on the hill, on her way "down
+street" to do some errand, and had walked on with her very affably.
+At parting she had said to her, in an off-hand, by-the-way fashion,--
+
+"Ruth, why won't you come over to-night, and take tea? I should like
+you to hear Mrs. Van Alstyne sing, and she would like your playing.
+There won't be any company; but we're having pretty good times now
+among ourselves."
+
+Ruth knew what the "no company" meant; just that there was no regular
+inviting, and so no slight in asking her alone, out of her family; but
+she knew the Marchbanks parlors were always full of an evening, and
+that the usual set would be pretty sure to get together, and that the
+end of it all would be an impromptu German, for which she should
+play, and that the Marchbanks's man would be sent home with her at
+eleven o'clock.
+
+She only thanked Adelaide, and said she "didn't know,--perhaps; but
+she hardly thought she could to-night; they had better not expect
+her," and got away without promising. She was thinking it over now.
+
+She did not want to be stiff and disobliging; and she would like to
+hear Mrs. Van Alstyne sing. If it were only for herself, she would
+very likely think it a reasonable "quid pro quo," and modestly
+acknowledge that she had no claim to absolutely gratuitous compliment.
+She would remember higher reason, also, than the _quid pro quo_; she
+would try to be glad in this little special "gift of ministering"; but
+it puzzled her about the others. How would they feel about it? Would
+they like it, her being asked so? Would they think she ought to go?
+And what if she were to get into this way of being asked alone?--she
+the very youngest; not "in society" yet even as much as Rose and
+Barbara; though Barbara said _they_ "never 'came' out,--they just
+leaked out."
+
+That was it; that would not do; she must not leak out, away from them,
+with her little waltz ripples; if there were any small help or power
+of hers that could be counted in to make them all more valued, she
+would not take it from the family fund and let it be counted alone to
+her sole credit. It must go with theirs. It was little enough that she
+could repay into the household that had given itself to her like a
+born home.
+
+She thought she would not even ask Mrs. Holabird anything about it, as
+at first she meant to do.
+
+But Mrs. Holabird had a way of coming right into things. "We girls"
+means Mrs. Holabird as much as anybody. It was always "we girls" in
+her heart, since girls' mothers never can quite lose the girl out of
+themselves; it only multiplies, and the "everlasting nominative" turns
+into a plural.
+
+Ruth still sat in her white chair, with her cheek on her hand and her
+elbow on the window-ledge, looking out across the pleasant swell of
+grass to where they were cutting the first hay in old Mr. Holabird's
+five-acre field, the click of the mowing-machine sounding like some
+new, gigantic kind of grasshopper, chirping its tremendous laziness
+upon the lazy air, when mother came in from the front hall, through
+her own room and saw her there.
+
+Mrs. Holabird never came through the rooms without a fresh thrill of
+pleasantness. Her home had _expressed_ itself here, as it had never
+done anywhere else. There was something in the fair, open, sunshiny
+roominess and cosey connection of these apartments, hers and her
+daughters', in harmony with the largeness and cheeriness and clearness
+in which her love and her wish for them held them always.
+
+It was more glad than grand; and she aimed at no grandness; but the
+generous space was almost splendid in its effect, as you looked
+through, especially to her who had lived and contrived in a "spy-glass
+house" so long.
+
+The doors right through from front to back, and the wide windows at
+either end and all the way, gave such sweep and light; also the long
+mirrors, that had been from time unrememberable over the mantels in
+the town parlors, in the old, useless, horizontal style, and were here
+put, quite elegantly tall,--the one in Mrs. Holabird's room above her
+daintily appointed dressing-table (which was only two great square
+trunks full of blankets, that could not be stowed away anywhere else,
+dressed up in delicate-patterned chintz and set with her boxes and
+cushions and toilet-bottles), and the other, in "the girls' room,"
+opposite; these made magnificent reflections and repetitions; and at
+night, when they all lit their bed-candles, and vibrated back and
+forth with their last words before they shut their doors and subsided,
+gave a truly festival and illuminated air to the whole mansion; so
+that Mrs. Roderick would often ask, when she came in of a morning in
+their busiest time, "Did you have company last night? I saw you were
+all lit up."
+
+"We had one candle apiece," Barbara would answer, very concisely.
+
+"I do wish all our windows didn't look Mrs. Roderick's way," Rosamond
+said once, after she had gone.
+
+"And that she _didn't_ have to come through our clothes-yard of a
+Monday morning, to see just how many white skirts we have in the
+wash," added Barbara.
+
+But this is off the track.
+
+"What is it, Ruth?" asked Mrs. Holabird, as she came in upon the
+little figure in the white chair, midway in the long light through the
+open rooms. "You didn't really mind Stephen, did you?"
+
+"O no, indeed, aunt! I was only thinking out things. I believe I've
+done, pretty nearly. I guess I sha'n't go. I wanted to make sure I
+wasn't provoked."
+
+"You're talking from where you left off, aren't you, Ruthie?"
+
+"Yes, I guess so," said Ruth, laughing. "It seems like talking right
+on,--doesn't it?--when you speak suddenly out of a 'think.' I wonder
+what _alone_ really means. It doesn't ever quite seem alone. Something
+thinks alongside always, or else you couldn't keep it up."
+
+"Are you making an essay on metaphysics? You're a queer little Ruth."
+
+"Am I?" Ruth laughed again. "I can't help it. It _does_ answer back."
+
+"And what was the answer about this time?"
+
+That was how Ruth came to let it out.
+
+"About going over to the Marchbanks's to-night. Don't say anything,
+though. I thought they needn't have asked me just to play. And they
+might have asked somebody with me. Of course it would have been as you
+said, if I'd wanted to; but I've made up my mind I--needn't. I mean, I
+knew right off that I _didn't_."
+
+Ruth did talk a funny idiom of her own when she came out of one of her
+thinks. But Mrs. Holabird understood. Mothers get to understand the
+older idiom, just as they do baby-talk,--by the same heart-key. She
+knew that the "needn't" and the "didn't" referred to the "wanting to."
+
+"You see, I don't think it would be a good plan to let them begin
+with me so."
+
+"You're a very sagacious little Ruth," said Mrs. Holabird,
+affectionately. "And a very generous one."
+
+"No, indeed!" Ruth exclaimed at that. "I believe I think it's rather
+nice to settle that I _can_ be contrary. I don't like to be
+pat-a-caked."
+
+She was glad, afterward, that Mrs. Holabird understood.
+
+The next morning Elinor Hadden and Leslie Goldthwaite walked over, to
+ask the girls to go down into the wood-hollow to get azaleas.
+
+Rosamond and Ruth went. Barbara was busy: she was more apt to be the
+busy one of a morning than Rosamond; not because Rosamond was not
+willing, but that when she _was_ at leisure she looked as though she
+always had been and always expected to be; she would have on a cambric
+morning-dress, and a jimpsey bit of an apron, and a pair of little
+fancy slippers,--(there was a secret about Rosamond's slippers; she
+had half a dozen different ways of getting them up, with braiding, and
+beading, and scraps of cloth and velvet; and these tops would go on to
+any stray soles she could get hold of, that were more sole than body,
+in a way she only knew of;) and she would have the sitting-room at the
+last point of morning freshness,--chairs and tables and books in the
+most charming relative positions, and every little leaf and flower in
+vase or basket just set as if it had so peeped up itself among the
+others, and all new-born to-day. So it was her gift to be ready and to
+receive. Barbara, if she really might have been dressed, would be as
+likely as not to be comfortable in a sack and skirt and her
+"points,"--as she called her black prunella shoes, that were weak at
+the heels and going at the sides, and kept their original character
+only by these embellishments upon the instep,--and to have dumped
+herself down on the broad lower stair in the hall, just behind the
+green blinds of the front entrance, with a chapter to finish in some
+irresistible book, or a pair of stockings to mend.
+
+Rosamond was only thankful when she was behind the scenes and would
+stay there, not bouncing into the door-way from the dining-room, with
+unexpected little bobs, a cake-bowl in one hand and an egg-beater in
+the other, to get what she called "grabs of conversation."
+
+Of course she did not do this when the Marchbankses were there, or if
+Miss Pennington called; but she could not resist the Haddens and
+Leslie Goldthwaite; besides, "they _did_ have to make their own cake,
+and why should they be ashamed of it?"
+
+Rosamond would reply that "they _did_ have to make their own beds, but
+they could not bring them down stairs for parlor work."
+
+"That was true, and reason why: they just couldn't; if they could, she
+would make up hers all over the house, just where there was the most
+fun. She hated pretences, and being fine."
+
+Rosamond met the girls on the piazza to-day, when she saw them coming;
+for Barbara was particularly awful at this moment, with a skimmer and
+a very red face, doing raspberries; and she made them sit down there
+in the shaker chairs, while she ran to get her hat and boots, and to
+call Ruth; and the first thing Barbara saw of them was from the
+kitchen window, "slanting off" down over the croquet-ground toward the
+big trees.
+
+Somebody overtook and joined them there,--somebody in a dark gray suit
+and bright buttons.
+
+"Why, that," cried Barbara, all to herself and her uplifted skimmer,
+looking after them,--"that must be the brother from West Point the
+Inglesides expected,--that young Dakie Thayne!"
+
+It was Dakie Thayne; who, after they had all been introduced and were
+walking on comfortably together, asked Ruth Holabird if it had not
+been she who had been expected and wanted so badly last night at Mrs.
+Marchbanks's?
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Ruth dropped a little back as she walked with him, at the moment,
+behind the others, along the path between the chestnut-trees.
+
+"I don't think they quite expected me. I told Adelaide I did not think
+I could come. I am the youngest, you see," she said with a smile, "and
+I don't go out very much, except with my--cousins."
+
+"Your cousins? I fancied you were all sisters."
+
+"It is all the same," said Ruth. "And that is why I always catch my
+breath a little before I say 'cousins.'"
+
+"Couldn't they come? What a pity!" pursued this young man, who seemed
+bent upon driving his questions home.
+
+"O, it wasn't an invitation, you know. It wasn't company."
+
+"Wasn't it?"
+
+The inflection was almost imperceptible, and quite unintentional;
+Dakie Thayne was very polite; but his eyebrows went up a little--just
+a line or two--as he said it, the light beginning to come in upon him.
+
+Dakie had been about in the world somewhat; his two years at West
+Point were not all his experience; and he knew what queer little
+wheels were turned sometimes.
+
+He had just come to Z---- (I must have a letter for my nameless town,
+and I have gone through the whole alphabet for it, and picked up a
+crooked stick at last), and the new group of people he had got among
+interested him. He liked problems and experiments. They were what he
+excelled in at the Military School. This was his first furlough; and
+it was since his entrance at the Academy that his brother, Dr.
+Ingleside, had come to Z----, to take the vacant practice of an old
+physician, disabled from continuing it.
+
+Dakie and Leslie Goldthwaite and Mrs. Ingleside were old friends;
+almost as old as Mrs. Ingleside and the doctor.
+
+Ruth Holabird had a very young girl's romance of admiration for one
+older, in her feeling toward Leslie. She had never known any one just
+like her; and, in truth, Leslie was different, in some things, from
+the little world of girls about her. In the "each and all" of their
+pretty groupings and pleasant relations she was like a bit of fresh,
+springing, delicate vine in a bouquet of bright, similarly beautiful
+flowers; taking little free curves and reaches of her own, just as she
+had grown; not tied, nor placed, nor constrained; never the central or
+most brilliant thing; but somehow a kind of life and grace that helped
+and touched and perfected all.
+
+There was something very real and individual about her; she was no
+"girl of the period," made up by the fashion of the day. She would
+have grown just as a rose or a violet would, the same in the first
+quarter of the century or the third. They called her "grandmotherly"
+sometimes, when a certain quaint primitiveness that was in her showed
+itself. And yet she was the youngest girl in all that set, as to
+simpleness and freshness and unpretendingness, though she was in her
+twentieth year now, which sounds--didn't somebody say so over my
+shoulder?--so very old! Adelaide Marchbanks used to say of her that
+she had "stayed fifteen."
+
+She _looked_ real. Her bright hair was gathered up loosely, with some
+graceful turn that showed its fine shining strands had all been
+freshly dressed and handled, under a wide-meshed net that lay lightly
+around her head; it was not packed and stuffed and matted and put on
+like a pad or bolster, from the bump of benevolence, all over that and
+everything else gentle and beautiful, down to the bend of her neck;
+and her dress suggested always some one simple idea which you could
+trace through it, in its harmony, at a glance; not complex and
+bewildering and fatiguing with its many parts and folds and
+festoonings and the garnishings of every one of these. She looked more
+as young women used to look before it took a lady with her dressmaker
+seven toilsome days to achieve a "short street suit," and the public
+promenades became the problems that they now are to the inquiring
+minds that are forced to wonder who stops at home and does up all the
+sewing, and where the hair all comes from.
+
+Some of the girls said, sometimes, that "Leslie Goldthwaite liked to
+be odd; she took pains to be." This was not true; she began with the
+prevailing fashion--the fundamental idea of it--always, when she had a
+new thing; but she modified and curtailed,--something was sure to stop
+her somewhere; and the trouble with the new fashions is that they
+never stop. To use a phrase she had picked up a few years ago,
+"something always got crowded out." She had other work to do, and she
+must choose the finishing that would take the shortest time; or satin
+folds would cost six dollars more, and she wanted the money to use
+differently; the dress was never the first and the _must be_; so it
+came by natural development to express herself, not the rampant mode;
+and her little ways of "dodging the dressmaker," as she called it,
+were sure to be graceful, as well as adroit and decided.
+
+It was a good thing for a girl like Ruth, just growing up to questions
+that had first come to this other girl of nineteen four years ago,
+that this other had so met them one by one, and decided them half
+unconsciously as she went along, that now, for the great puzzle of the
+"outside," which is setting more and more between us and our real
+living, there was this one more visible, unobtrusive answer put
+ready, and with such a charm of attractiveness, into the world.
+
+Ruth walked behind her this morning, with Dakie Thayne, thinking how
+"achy" Elinor Hadden's puffs and French-blue bands, and bits of
+embroidery looked, for the stitches somebody had put into them, and
+the weary starching and ironing and perking out that must be done for
+them, beside the simple hem and the one narrow basque ruffling of
+Leslie's cambric morning-dress, which had its color and its set-off in
+itself, in the bright little carnations with brown stems that figured
+it. It was "trimmed in the piece"; and that was precisely what Leslie
+had said when she chose it. She "dodged" a great deal in the mere
+buying.
+
+Leslie and Ruth got together in the wood-hollow, where the little
+vines and ferns began. Leslie was quick to spy the bits of creeping
+Mitchella, and the wee feathery fronds that hid away their miniature
+grace under the feet of their taller sisters. They were so pretty to
+put in shells, and little straight tube-vases. Dakie Thayne helped
+Rose and Elinor to get the branches of white honeysuckle that grew
+higher up.
+
+Rose walked with the young cadet, the arms of both filled with the
+fragrant-flowering stems, as they came up homeward again. She was full
+of bright, pleasant chat. It just suited her to spend a morning so, as
+if there were no rooms to dust and no tables to set, in all the great
+sunshiny world; but as if dews freshened everything, and furnishings
+"came," and she herself were clothed of the dawn and the breeze, like
+a flower. She never cared so much for afternoons, she said; of course
+one had got through with the prose by that time; but "to go off like
+a bird or a bee right after breakfast,--that was living; that was the
+Irishman's blessing,--'the top o' the morn-in' till yez!'"
+
+"Won't you come in and have some lunch?" she asked, with the most
+magnificent intrepidity, when she hadn't the least idea what there
+would be to give them all if they did, as they came round under the
+piazza basement, and up to the front portico.
+
+They thanked her, no; they must get home with their flowers; and Mrs.
+Ingleside expected Dakie to an early dinner.
+
+Upon which she bade them good by, standing among her great azalea
+branches, and looking "awfully pretty," as Dakie Thayne said
+afterward, precisely as if she had nothing else to think of.
+
+The instant they had fairly moved away, she turned and ran in, in a
+hurry to look after the salt-cellars, and to see that Katty hadn't got
+the table-cloth diagonal to the square of the room instead of
+parallel, or committed any of the other general-housework horrors
+which she detailed herself on daily duty to prevent.
+
+Barbara stood behind the blind.
+
+"The audacity of that!" she cried, as Rosamond came in. "I shook right
+out of my points when I heard you! Old Mrs. Lovett has been here, and
+has eaten up exactly the last slice of cake but one. So that's Dakie
+Thayne?"
+
+"Yes. He's a nice little fellow. Aren't these lovely flowers?"
+
+"O my gracious! that great six-foot cadet!"
+
+"It doesn't matter about the feet. He's barely eighteen. But he's
+nice,--ever so nice."
+
+"It's a case of Outledge, Leslie," Dakie Thayne said, going down the
+hill. "They treat those girls--amphibiously!"
+
+"Well," returned Leslie, laughing, "_I'm_ amphibious. I live in the
+town, and I _can_ come out--and not die--on the Hill. I like it. I
+always thought that kind of animal had the nicest time."
+
+They met Alice Marchbanks with her cousin Maud, coming up.
+
+"We've been to see the Holabirds," said Dakie Thayne, right off.
+
+"I wonder why that little Ruth didn't come last night? We really
+wanted her," said Alice to Leslie Goldthwaite.
+
+"For batrachian reasons, I believe," put in Dakie, full of fun. "She
+isn't quite amphibious yet. She don't come out from under water. That
+is, she's young, and doesn't go alone. She told me so."
+
+You needn't keep asking how we know! Things that belong get together.
+People who tell a story see round corners.
+
+The next morning Maud Marchbanks came over, and asked us all to play
+croquet and drink tea with them that evening, with the Goldthwaites
+and the Haddens.
+
+"We're growing very gay and multitudinous," she said, graciously.
+
+"The midshipman's got home,--Harry Goldthwaite, you know."
+
+Ruth was glad, then, that mother knew; she had the girls' pride in her
+own keeping; there was no responsibility of telling or withholding.
+But she was glad also that she had not gone last night.
+
+When we went up stairs at bedtime, Rosamond asked Barbara the old,
+inevitable question,--
+
+"What have you got to wear, Barb, to-morrow night,--that's ready?"
+
+And Barbara gave, in substance, the usual unperturbed answer, "Not a
+dud!"
+
+But Mrs. Holabird kept a garnet and white striped silk skirt on
+purpose to lend to Barbara. If she had _given_ it, there would have
+been the end. And among us there would generally be a muslin waist,
+and perhaps an overskirt. Barbara said our "overskirts" were skirts
+that were _over with_, before the new fashion came.
+
+Barbara went to bed like a chicken, sure that in the big world
+to-morrow there would be something that she could pick up.
+
+It was a miserable plan, perhaps; but it _was_ one of our ways at
+Westover.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+BETWIXT AND BETWEEN.
+
+
+Three things came of the Marchbanks's party for us Holabirds.
+
+Mrs. Van Alstyne took a great fancy to Rosamond.
+
+Harry Goldthwaite put a new idea into Barbara's head.
+
+And Ruth's little undeveloped plans, which the facile fingers were to
+carry out, received a fresh and sudden impetus.
+
+You have thus the three heads of the present chapter.
+
+How could any one help taking a fancy to Rosamond Holabird? In the
+first place, as Mrs. Van Alstyne said, there was the name,--"a making
+for anybody"; for names do go a great way, notwithstanding
+Shakespeare.
+
+It made you think of everything springing and singing and blooming and
+sweet. Its expression was "blossomy, nightingale-y"; atilt with glee
+and grace. And that was the way she looked and seemed. If you spoke to
+her suddenly, the head turned as a bird's does, with a small, shy,
+all-alive movement; and the bright eye glanced up at you, ready to
+catch electric meanings from your own. When she talked to you in
+return, she talked all over; with quiet, refined radiations of life
+and pleasure in each involuntary turn and gesture; the blossom of her
+face lifted and swayed like that of a flower delicately poised upon
+its stalk. She was _like_ a flower chatting with a breeze.
+
+She forgot altogether, as a present fact, that she looked pretty; but
+she had known it once, when she dressed herself, and been glad of it;
+and something lasted from the gladness just enough to keep out of her
+head any painful, conscious question of how she _was_ seeming. That,
+and her innate sense of things proper and refined, made her manners
+what Mrs. Van Alstyne pronounced them,--"exquisite."
+
+That was all Mrs. Van Alstyne waited to find out. She did not go deep;
+hence she took quick fancies or dislikes, and a great many of them.
+
+She got Rosamond over into a corner with herself, and they had
+everybody round them. All the people in the room were saying how
+lovely Miss Holabird looked to-night. For a little while that seemed a
+great and beautiful thing. I don't know whether it was or not. It was
+pleasant to have them find it out; but she would have been just as
+lovely if they had not. Is a party so very particular a thing to be
+lovely in? I wonder what makes the difference. She might have stood on
+that same square of the Turkey carpet the next day and been just as
+pretty. But, somehow, it seemed grand in the eyes of us girls, and it
+meant a great deal that it would not mean the next day, to have her
+stand right there, and look just so, to-night.
+
+In the midst of it all, though, Ruth saw something that seemed to her
+grander,--another girl, in another corner, looking on,--a girl with a
+very homely face; somebody's cousin, brought with them there. She
+looked pleased and self-forgetful, differently from Rose in her
+prettiness; _she_ looked as if she had put herself away, comfortably
+satisfied; this one looked as if there were no self put away anywhere.
+Ruth turned round to Leslie Goldthwaite, who stood by.
+
+"I do think," she said,--"don't you?--it's just the bravest and
+strongest thing in the world to be awfully homely, and to know it, and
+to go right on and have a good time just the same;--_every day_, you
+see, right through everything! I think such people must be splendid
+inside!"
+
+"The most splendid person I almost ever knew was like that," said
+Leslie. "And she was fifty years old too."
+
+"Well," said Ruth, drawing a girl's long breath at the fifty years,
+"it was pretty much over then, wasn't it? But I think I should
+like--just once--to look beautiful at a party!"
+
+The best of it for Barbara had been on the lawn, before tea.
+
+Barbara was a magnificent croquet-player. She and Harry Goldthwaite
+were on one side, and they led off their whole party, going
+nonchalantly through wicket after wicket, as if they could not help
+it; and after they had well distanced the rest, just toling each
+other along over the ground, till they were rovers together, and came
+down into the general field again with havoc to the enemy, and the
+whole game in their hands on their own part.
+
+"It was a handsome thing to see, for once," Dakie Thayne said; "but
+they might make much of it, for it wouldn't do to let them play on the
+same side again."
+
+It was while they were off, apart down the slope, just croqueted away
+for the time, to come up again with tremendous charge presently, that
+Harry asked her if she knew the game of "ship-coil."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Barbara shook her head. What was it?
+
+"It is a pretty thing. The officers of a Russian frigate showed it to
+us. They play it with rings made of spliced rope; we had them plain
+enough, but you might make them as gay as you liked. There are ten
+rings, and each player throws them all at each turn. The object is to
+string them up over a stake, from which you stand at a certain
+distance. Whatever number you make counts up for your side, and you
+play as many rounds as you may agree upon."
+
+Barbara thought a minute, and then looked up quickly.
+
+"Have you told anybody else of that?"
+
+"Not here. I haven't thought of it for a good while."
+
+"Would you just please, then," said Barbara in a hurry, as somebody
+came down toward them in pursuit of a ball, "to hush up, and let me
+have it all to myself for a while? And then," she added, as the stray
+ball was driven up the lawn again, and the player went away after it,
+"come some day and help us get it up at Westover? it's such a thing,
+you see, to get anything that's new."
+
+"I see. To be sure. You shall have the State Right,--isn't that what
+they make over for patent concerns? And we'll have something famous
+out of it. They're getting tired of croquet, or thinking they ought to
+be, which is the same thing." It was Barbara's turn now; she hit Harry
+Goldthwaite's ball with one of her precise little taps, and, putting
+the two beside each other with her mallet, sent them up rollicking
+into the thick of the fight, where the final hand-to-hand struggle was
+taking place between the last two wickets and the stake. Everybody was
+there in a bunch when she came; in a minute everybody of the opposing
+party was everywhere else, and she and Harry had it between them
+again. She played out two balls, and then, accidentally, her own.
+After one "distant, random gun," from the discomfited foe, Harry
+rolled quietly up against the wand, and the game was over.
+
+It was then and there that a frank, hearty liking and alliance was
+re-established between Harry Goldthwaite and Barbara, upon an old
+remembered basis of ten years ago, when he had gone away to school and
+given her half his marbles for a parting keepsake,--"as he might have
+done," we told her, "to any other boy."
+
+"Ruth hasn't had a good time," said mother, softly, standing in her
+door, looking through at the girls laying away ribbons and pulling
+down hair, and chattering as only girls in their teens do chatter at
+bedtime.
+
+Ruth was in her white window-chair, one foot up on a cricket; and, as
+if she could not get into that place without her considering-fit
+coming over her, she sat with her one unlaced boot in her hand, and
+her eyes away out over the moonlighted fields.
+
+"She played all the evening, nearly. She always does," said Barbara.
+
+"Why, I had a splendid time!" cried Ruth, coming down upon them out of
+her cloud with flat contradiction. "And I'm sure I didn't play all the
+evening. Mrs. Van Alstyne sang Tennyson's 'Brook,' aunt; and the music
+_splashes_ so in it! It did really seem as if she were spattering it
+all over the room, and it wasn't a bit of matter!"
+
+"The time was so good, then, that it has made you sober," said Mrs.
+Holabird, coming and putting her hand on the back of the white chair.
+"I've known good times do that."
+
+"It has given me ever so much thinking to do; besides that brook in my
+head, 'going on forever--ever! _go_-ing-on-forever!'" And Ruth broke
+into the joyous refrain of the song as she ended.
+
+"I shall come to you for a great long talk to-morrow morning, mother!"
+Ruth said again, turning her head and touching her lips to the
+mother-hand on her chair. She did not always say "mother," you see; it
+was only when she wanted a very dear word.
+
+"We'll wind the rings with all the pretty-colored stuffs we can find
+in the bottomless piece-bag," Barbara was saying, at the same moment,
+in the room beyond. "And you can bring out your old ribbon-box for the
+bowing-up, Rosamond. It's a charity to clear out your glory-holes once
+in a while. It's going to be just--splend-umphant!"
+
+"If you don't go and talk about it," said Rosamond. "We _must_ keep
+the new of it to ourselves."
+
+"As if I needed!" cried Barbara, indignantly. "When I hushed up Harry
+Goldthwaite, and went round all the rest of the evening without doing
+anything but just give you that awful little pinch!"
+
+"That was bad enough," said Rosamond, quietly; she never got cross or
+inelegantly excited about anything. "But I _do_ think the girls will
+like it. And we might have tea out on the broad piazza."
+
+"That is bare floor too," said Barbara, mischievously.
+
+Now, our dining-room had not yet even the English drugget. The dark
+new boards would do for summer weather, mother said. "If it had been
+real oak, polished!" Rosamond thought. "But hard-pine was kitcheny."
+
+Ruth went to bed with the rest of her thinking and the brook-music
+flittering in her brain.
+
+Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks had talked behind her with Jeannie Hadden about
+her playing. It was not the compliment that excited her so, although
+they said her touch and expression were wonderful, and that her
+fingers were like little flying magnets, that couldn't miss the right
+points. Jeannie Hadden said she liked to _see_ Ruth Holabird play, as
+well as she did to hear her.
+
+But it was Mrs. Marchbanks's saying that she would give almost
+anything to have Lily taught such a style; she hardly knew what she
+should do with her; there was no good teacher in the town who gave
+lessons at the houses, and Lily was not strong enough to go regularly
+to Mr. Viertelnote. Besides, she had picked up a story of his being
+cross, and rapping somebody's fingers, and Lily was very shy and
+sensitive. She never did herself any justice if she began to be
+afraid.
+
+Jeannie Hadden said it was just her mother's trouble about Reba,
+except that Reba was strong enough; only that Mrs. Hadden preferred a
+teacher to come to the house.
+
+"A good young-lady teacher, to give beginners a desirable style from
+the very first, is exceedingly needed since Miss Robbyns went away,"
+said Mrs. Marchbanks, to whom just then her sister came and said
+something, and drew her off.
+
+Ruth's fingers flew over the keys; and it must have been magnetism
+that guided them, for in her brain quite other quick notes were
+struck, and ringing out a busy chime of their own.
+
+"If I only could!" she was saying to herself. "If they really would
+have me, and they would let me at home. Then I could go to Mr.
+Viertelnote. I think I could do it! I'm almost sure! I could show
+anybody what I know,--and if they like that!"
+
+It went over and over now, as she lay wakeful in bed, mixed up with
+the "forever--ever," and the dropping tinkle of that lovely trembling
+ripple of accompaniment, until the late moon got round to the south
+and slanted in between the white dimity curtains, and set a glimmering
+little ghost in the arm-chair.
+
+Ruth came down late to breakfast.
+
+Barbara was pushing back her chair.
+
+"Mother,--or anybody! Do you want any errand down in town? I'm going
+out for a stramble. A party always has to be walked off next morning."
+
+"And talked off, doesn't it? I'm afraid my errand would need to be
+with Mrs. Goldthwaite or Mrs. Hadden, wouldn't it?"
+
+"Well, I dare say I shall go in and see Leslie. Rosamond, why can't
+you come too? It's a sort of nuisance that boy having come home!"
+
+"That 'great six-foot lieutenant'!" parodied Rose.
+
+"I don't care! You said feet didn't signify. And he used to be a boy,
+when we played with him so."
+
+"I suppose they all used to be," said Rose, demurely.
+
+"Well, I won't go! Because the truth is I did want to see him, about
+those--patent rights. I dare say they'll come up."
+
+"I've no doubt," said Rosamond.
+
+"I wish you _would_ both go away somewhere," said Ruth, as Mrs.
+Holabird gave her her coffee. "Because I and mother have got a secret,
+and I know she wants her last little hot corner of toast."
+
+"I think you are likely to get the last little cold corner," said Mrs.
+Holabird, as Ruth sat, forgetting her plate, after the other girls had
+gone away.
+
+"I'm thinking, mother, of a real warm little corner! Something that
+would just fit in and make everything so nice. It was put into my head
+last night, and I think it was sent on purpose; it came right up
+behind me so. Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks and Jeannie Hadden praised my
+playing; more than I could tell you, really; and Mrs. Marchbanks
+wants a--" Ruth stopped, and laughed at the word that was
+coming--"_lady_-teacher for Lily, and so does Mrs. Hadden for Reba.
+There, mother. It's in _your_ head now! Please turn it over with a
+nice little think, and tell me you would just as lief, and that you
+believe perhaps I could!"
+
+By this time Ruth was round behind Mrs. Holabird's chair, with her two
+hands laid against her cheeks. Mrs. Holabird leaned her face down upon
+one of the hands, holding it so, caressingly.
+
+"I am sure you could, Ruthie. But I am sure I _wouldn't_ just as lief!
+I would liefer you should have all you need without."
+
+"I know that, mother. But it wouldn't be half so good for me!"
+
+"That's something horrid, I know!" exclaimed Barbara, coming in upon
+the last word. "It always is, when people talk about its being good
+for them. It's sure to be salts or senna, and most likely both."
+
+"O dear me!" said Ruth, suddenly seized with a new perception of
+difficulty. Until now, she had only been considering whether she
+could, and if Mrs. Holabird would approve. "_Don't_ you--or Rose--call
+it names, Barbara, please, will you?"
+
+"Which of us are you most afraid of? For Rosamond's salts and senna
+are different from mine, pretty often. I guess it's hers this time, by
+your putting her in that anxious parenthesis."
+
+"I'm afraid of your fun, Barbara, and I'm afraid of Rosamond's--"
+
+"Earnest? Well, that is much the more frightful. It is so awfully
+quiet and pretty-behaved and positive. But if you're going to retain
+me on your side, you'll have to lay the case before me, you know, and
+give me a fee. You needn't stand there, bribing the judge beforehand."
+
+Ruth turned right round and kissed Barbara.
+
+"I want you to go with me and see if Mrs. Hadden and Mrs. Lewis
+Marchbanks would let me teach the children."
+
+"Teach the children! What?"
+
+"O, music, of course. That's all I know, pretty much. And--make Rose
+understand."
+
+"Ruth, you're a duck! I like you for it! But I'm not sure I like
+_it_."
+
+"Will you do just those two things?"
+
+"It's a beautiful programme. But suppose we leave out the first part?
+I think you could do that alone. It would spoil it if I went. It's
+such a nice little spontaneous idea of your own, you see. But if we
+made it a regular family delegation--besides, it will take as much as
+all me to manage the second. Rosamond is very elegant to-day. Last
+night's twilight isn't over. And it's funny _we_'ve plans too; _we_'re
+going to give lessons,--differently; we're going to lead off, for
+once,--we Holabirds; and I don't know exactly how the music will chime
+in. It _may_ make things--Holabirdy."
+
+Rosamond had true perceptions, and she was conscientious. What she
+said, therefore, when she was told, was,--
+
+"O dear! I suppose it is right! But--just now! Right things do come in
+so terribly askew, like good old Mr. Isosceles, sidling up the broad
+aisle of a Sunday! Couldn't you wait awhile, Ruth?"
+
+"And then somebody else would get the chance."
+
+"There's nobody else to be had."
+
+"Nobody knows till somebody starts up. They don't know there's _me_ to
+be had yet."
+
+"O Ruth! Don't offer to teach grammar, anyhow!"
+
+"I don't know. I might. I shouldn't _teach_ it 'anyhow.'"
+
+Ruth went off, laughing, happy. She knew she had gamed the home-half
+of her point.
+
+Her heart beat a good deal, though, when she went into Mrs.
+Marchbanks's library alone, and sat waiting for the lady to come down.
+
+She would rather have gone to Mrs. Hadden first, who was very kind and
+old-fashioned, and not so overpoweringly grand. But she had her
+justification for her attempt from Mrs. Marchbanks's own lips, and she
+must take up her opportunity as it came to her, following her clew
+right end first. She meant simply to tell Mrs. Marchbanks how she had
+happened to think of it.
+
+"Good morning," said the great lady, graciously, wondering not a
+little what had brought the child, in this unceremonious early
+fashion, to ask for her.
+
+"I came," said Ruth, after she had answered the good morning, "because
+I heard what you were so kind as to say last night about liking my
+playing; and that you had nobody just now to teach Lily. I thought,
+perhaps, you might be willing to try me; for I should like to do it,
+and I think I could show her all I know; and then I could take lessons
+myself of Mr. Viertelnote. I've been thinking about it all night."
+
+Ruth Holabird had a direct little fashion of going straight through
+whatever crust of outside appearance to that which must respond to
+what she had at the moment in herself. She had real _self-possession_;
+because she did not let herself be magnetized into a false
+consciousness of somebody else's self, and think and speak according
+to their notions of things, or her reflected notion of what they would
+think of her. She was different from Rosamond in this; Rosamond could
+not help _feeling her double_,--Mrs. Grundy's "idea" of her. That was
+what Rosamond said herself about it, when Ruth told it all at home.
+
+The response is almost always there to those who go for it; if it is
+not, there is no use any way.
+
+Mrs. Marchbanks smiled.
+
+"Does Mrs. Holabird know?"
+
+"O yes; she always knows."
+
+There was a little distance and a touch of business in Mrs.
+Marchbanks's manner after this. The child's own impulse had been very
+frank and amusing; an authorized seeking of employment was somewhat
+different. Still, she was kind enough; the impression had been made;
+perhaps Rosamond, with her "just now" feeling, would have been
+sensitive to what did not touch Ruth, at the moment, at all.
+
+"But you see, my dear, that _your_ having a pupil could not be quite
+equal to Mr. Viertelnote's doing the same thing. I mean the one would
+not quite provide for the other."
+
+"O no, indeed! I'm in hopes to have two. I mean to go and see Mrs.
+Hadden about Reba; and then I might begin first, you know. If I could
+teach two quarters, I could take one."
+
+"You have thought it all over. You are quite a little business woman.
+Now let us see. I do like your playing, Ruth. I think you have really
+a charming style. But whether you could _impart_ it,--that is a
+different capacity."
+
+"I am pretty good at showing how," said Ruth. "I think I could make
+her understand all I do."
+
+"Well; I should be willing to pay twenty dollars a quarter to any lady
+who would bring Lily forward to where you are; if you can do it, I
+will pay it to you. If Mrs. Hadden will do the same, you will have two
+thirds of Viertelnote's price."
+
+"O, that is so nice!" said Ruth, gratefully. "Then in half a quarter I
+could begin. And perhaps in that time I might get another."
+
+"I shall be exceedingly interested in your getting on," said Mrs.
+Marchbanks, as Ruth arose to go. She said it very much as she might
+have said it to anybody who was going to try to earn money, and whom
+she meant to patronize. But Ruth took it singly; she was not two
+persons,--one who asked for work and pay, and another who expected to
+be treated as if she were privileged above either. She was quite
+intent upon her purpose.
+
+If Mrs. Marchbanks had been patron kind, Mrs. Hadden was motherly so.
+
+"You're a dear little thing! When will you begin?" said she.
+
+Ruth's morning was a grand success. She came home with a rapid step,
+springing to a soundless rhythm.
+
+She found Rosamond and Barbara and Harry Goldthwaite on the piazza,
+winding the rope rings with blue and scarlet and white and purple, and
+tying them with knots of ribbon.
+
+Harry had been prompt enough. He had got the rope, and spliced it up
+himself, that morning, and had brought the ten rings over, hanging
+upon his arms like bangles.
+
+They were still busy when dinner was ready; and Harry stayed at the
+first asking.
+
+It was a scrub-day in the kitchen; and Katty came in to take the
+plates with her sleeves rolled up, a smooch of stove-polish across her
+arm, and a very indiscriminate-colored apron. She put one plate upon
+another in a hurry, over knives and forks and remnants, clattered a
+good deal, and dropped the salt-spoons.
+
+Rosamond colored and frowned; but talked with a most resolutely
+beautiful repose.
+
+Afterward, when it was all over, and Harry had gone, promising to come
+next day and bring a stake, painted vermilion and white, with a
+little gilt ball on the top of it, she sat by the ivied window in the
+brown room with tears in her eyes.
+
+"It is dreadful to live so!" she said, with real feeling. "To have
+just one wretched girl to do everything!"
+
+"Especially," said Barbara, without much mercy, "when she always
+_will_ do it at dinner-time."
+
+"It's the betwixt and between that I can't bear," said Rose. "To have
+to do with people like the Penningtons and the Marchbankses, and to
+see their ways; to sit at tables where there is noiseless and perfect
+serving, and to know that they think it is the 'mainspring of life'
+(that's just what Mrs. Van Alstyne said about it the other day); and
+then to have to hitch on so ourselves, knowing just as well what ought
+to be as she does,--it's too bad. It's double dealing. I'd rather not
+know, or pretend any better. I do wish we _belonged_ somewhere!"
+
+Ruth felt sorry. She always did when Rosamond was hurt with these
+things. She knew it came from a very pure, nice sense of what was
+beautiful, and a thoroughness of desire for it. She knew she wanted it
+_every day_, and that nobody hated shams, or company contrivances,
+more heartily. She took great trouble for it; so that when they were
+quite alone, and Rosamond could manage, things often went better than
+when guests came and divided her attention.
+
+Ruth went over to where she sat.
+
+"Rose, perhaps we _do_ belong just here. Somebody has got to be in the
+shading-off, you know. That helps both ways."
+
+"It's a miserable indefiniteness, though."
+
+"No, it isn't," said Barbara, quickly. "It's a good plan, and I like
+it. Ruth just hits it. I see now what they mean by 'drawing lines.'
+You can't draw them anywhere but in the middle of the stripes. And
+people that are _right_ in the middle have to 'toe the mark.' It's the
+edge, after all. You can reach a great deal farther by being betwixt
+and between. And one girl needn't _always_ be black-leaded, nor drop
+all the spoons."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+NEXT THINGS.
+
+
+Rosamond's ship-coil party was a great success. It resolved itself
+into Rosamond's party, although Barbara had had the first thought of
+it; for Rosamond quietly took the management of all that was to be
+delicately and gracefully arranged, and to have the true tone of high
+propriety.
+
+Barbara made the little white rolls; Rosamond and Ruth beat up the
+cake; mother attended to the boiling of the tongues, and, when it was
+time, to the making of the delicious coffee; all together we gave all
+sorts of pleasant touches to the brown room, and set the round table
+(the old cover could be "shied" out of sight now, as Stephen said, and
+replaced with the white glistening damask for the tea) in the corner
+between the southwest windows that opened upon the broad piazza.
+
+The table was bright with pretty silver--not too much--and best glass
+and delicate porcelain with a tiny thread of gold; and the rolls and
+the thin strips of tongue cut lengthwise, so rich and tender that a
+fork could manage them, and the large raspberries, black and red and
+white, were upon plates and dishes of real Indian, white and golden
+brown.
+
+The wide sashes were thrown up, and there were light chairs outside;
+Mrs. Holabird would give the guests tea and coffee, and Ruth and
+Barbara would sit in the window-seats and do the waiting, back and
+forth, and Dakie Thayne and Harry Goldthwaite would help.
+
+Katty held her office as a sinecure that day; looked on admiringly,
+forgot half her regular work, felt as if she had somehow done wonders
+without realizing the process, and pronounced that it was "no throuble
+at ahl to have company."
+
+But before the tea was the new game.
+
+It was a bold stroke for us Holabirds. Originating was usually done
+higher up; as the Papal Council gives forth new spiritual inventions
+for the joyful acceptance of believers, who may by no means invent in
+their turn and offer to the Council. One could hardly tell how it
+would fall out,--whether the Haddens and the Marchbankses would take
+to it, or whether it would drop right there.
+
+"They _may_ 'take it off your hands, my dear,'" suggested the
+remorseless Barbara. Somebody had offered to do that once for Mrs.
+Holabird, when her husband had had an interest in a ship in the Baltic
+trade, and some furs had come home, richer than we had quite expected.
+
+Rose was loftily silent; she would not have _said_ that to her very
+self; but she had her little quiet instincts of holding on,--through
+Harry Goldthwaite, chiefly; it was his novelty.
+
+Does this seem _very_ bare worldly scheming among young girls who
+should simply have been having a good time? We should not tell you if
+we did not know; it _begins_ right there among them, in just such
+things as these; and our day and our life are full of it.
+
+The Marchbanks set had a way of taking things off people's hands, as
+soon as they were proved worth while. People like the Holabirds could
+not be taking this pains every day; making their cakes and their
+coffee, and setting their tea-table in their parlor; putting aside all
+that was shabby or inadequate, for a few special hours, and turning
+all the family resources upon a point, to serve an occasion. But if
+anything new or bright were so produced that could be transplanted, it
+was so easy to receive it among the established and every-day
+elegances of a freer living, give it a wider introduction, and so
+adopt and repeat and centralize it that the originators should fairly
+forget they had ever begun it. And why would not this be honor enough?
+Invention must always pass over to the capital that can handle it.
+
+The new game charmed them all. The girls had the best of it, for the
+young men always gathered up the rings and brought them to each in
+turn. It was very pretty to receive both hands full of the gayly
+wreathed and knotted hoops, to hold them slidden along one arm like
+garlands, to pass them lightly from hand to hand again, and to toss
+them one by one through the air with a motion of more or less
+inevitable grace; and the excitement of hope or of success grew with
+each succeeding trial.
+
+They could not help liking it, even the most fastidious; they might
+venture upon liking it, for it was a game with an origin and
+references. It was an officers' game, on board great naval ships; it
+had proper and sufficient antecedents. It would do.
+
+By the time they stopped playing in the twilight, and went up the wide
+end steps upon the deep, open platform, where coffee and biscuits
+began to be fragrant, Rosamond knew that her party was as nice as if
+it had been anybody's else whoever; that they were all having as
+genuinely good a time as if they had not come "westover" to get it.
+
+And everybody does like a delicious tea, such as is far more sure and
+very different from hands like Mrs. Holabird's and her daughters, than
+from those of a city confectioner and the most professed of private
+cooks.
+
+It all went off and ended in a glory,--the glory of the sun pouring
+great backward floods of light and color all up to the summer zenith,
+and of the softly falling and changing shade, and the slow
+forth-coming of the stars: and Ruth gave them music, and by and by
+they had a little German, out there on the long, wide esplanade. It
+was the one magnificence of their house,--this high, spacious terrace;
+Rosamond was thankful every day that Grandfather Holabird _had_ to
+build the wood-house under it.
+
+After this, Westover began to grow to be more of a centre than our
+home, cheery and full of girl-life as it was, had ever been able to
+become before.
+
+They might have transplanted the game,--they did take slips from
+it,--and we might not always have had tickets to our own play; but
+they could not transplant Harry Goldthwaite and Dakie Thayne. They
+_would_ come over, nearly every day, at morning or evening, and
+practise "coil," or make some other plan or errand; and so there came
+to be always something going on at the Holabirds', and if the other
+girls wanted it, they had to come where it was.
+
+Mrs. Van Alstyne came often; Rosamond grew very intimate with her.
+
+Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks did say, one day, that she thought "the
+Holabirds were slightly mistaking their position"; but the remark did
+not come round, westover, till long afterward, and meanwhile the
+position remained the same.
+
+It was right in the midst of all this that Ruth astonished the family
+again, one evening.
+
+"I wish," she said, suddenly, just as if she were not suggesting
+something utterly incongruous and disastrous, "that we could ask
+Lucilla Waters up here for a little visit."
+
+The girls had a way, in Z----, of spending two or three days together
+at each other's houses, neighbors though they were, within easy reach,
+and seeing each other almost constantly. Leslie Goldthwaite came up to
+the Haddens', or they went down to the Goldthwaites'. The Haddens
+would stay over night at the Marchbanks', and on through the next day,
+and over night again. There were, indeed, three recognized degrees of
+intimacy: that which took tea,--that which came in of a morning and
+stayed to lunch,--and that which was kept over night without plan or
+ceremony. It had never been very easy for us Holabirds to do such
+things without plan; of all things, nearly, in the world, it seemed to
+us sometimes beautiful and desirable to be able to live just so as
+that we might.
+
+"I wish," said Ruth, "that we could have Lucilla Waters here."
+
+"My gracious!" cried Rosamond, startled into a soft explosion. "What
+for?"
+
+"Why, I think she'd like it," answered Ruth.
+
+"Well, I suppose Arctura Fish might 'like it' too," responded Rose, in
+a deadly quiet way now, that was the extreme of sarcasm.
+
+Ruth looked puzzled; as if she really considered what Rosamond
+suggested, not having thought of it before, and not quite knowing how
+to dispose of the thought since she had got it.
+
+Dakie Thayne was there; he sat holding some gold-colored wool for Mrs.
+Holabird to wind; she was giving herself the luxury of some pretty
+knitting,--making a bright little sofa affghan. Ruth had forgotten him
+at the instant, speaking out of a quiet pause and her own intent
+thought.
+
+She made up her mind presently,--partly at least,--and spoke again. "I
+don't believe," she said, "that it would be the next thing for Arctura
+Fish."
+
+Dakie Thayne's eyebrows went up, just that half perceptible line or
+two. "Do you think people ought always to have the next thing?" he
+asked.
+
+"It seems to me it must be somebody's fault if they don't," replied
+Ruth.
+
+"It is a long waiting sometimes to get the next thing," said Dakie
+Thayne. "Army men find that out. They grow gray getting it."
+
+"That's where only one _can_ have it at a time," said Ruth. "These
+things are different."
+
+"'Next things' interfere occasionally," said Barbara. "Next things up,
+and next things down."
+
+"I don't know," said Rose, serenely unconscious and impersonal. "I
+suppose people wouldn't naturally--it can't be meant they should--walk
+right away from their own opportunities."
+
+Ruth laughed,--not aloud, only a little single breath, over her work.
+
+Dakie Thayne leaned back.
+
+"What,--if you please,--Miss Ruth?"
+
+"I was thinking of the opportunities _down_," Ruth answered.
+
+It was several days after this that the young party drifted together
+again, on the Westover lawn. A plan was discussed. Mrs. Van Alstyne
+had walked over with Olivia and Adelaide Marchbanks, and it was she
+who suggested it.
+
+"Why don't you have regular practisings," said she, "and then a
+meeting, for this and the archery you wanted to get up, and games for
+a prize? They would do nicely together."
+
+Olivia Marchbanks drew up a little. She had not meant to launch the
+project here. Everything need not begin at Westover all at once.
+
+But Dakie Thayne broke in.
+
+"Did you think of that?" said he. "It's a capital idea."
+
+"Ideas are rather apt to be that," said Adelaide Marchbanks. "It is
+the carrying out, you see."
+
+"Isn't it pretty nearly carried out already? It is only to organize
+what we are doing as it is."
+
+"But the minute you _do_ organize! You don't know how difficult it is
+in a place like this. A dozen of us are not enough, and as soon as you
+go beyond, there gets to be too much of it. One doesn't know where to
+stop."
+
+"Or to skip?" asked Harry Goldthwaite, in such a purely bright,
+good-natured way that no one could take it amiss.
+
+"Well, yes, to skip," said Adelaide. "Of course that's it. You don't
+go straight on, you know, house by house, when you ask people,--down
+the hill and into the town."
+
+"We talked it over," said Olivia. "And we got as far as the Hobarts."
+There Olivia stopped. That was where they had stopped before.
+
+"O yes, the Hobarts; they would be sure to like it," said Leslie
+Goldthwaite, quick and pleased.
+
+"Her ups and downs are just like yours," said Dakie Thayne to Ruth
+Holabird.
+
+It made Ruth very glad to be told she was at all like Leslie; it gave
+her an especially quick pulse of pleasure to have Dakie Thayne say so.
+She knew he thought there was hardly any one like Leslie Goldthwaite.
+
+"O, they _won't_ exactly do, you know!" said Adelaide Marchbanks, with
+an air of high free-masonry.
+
+"Won't do what?" asked Cadet Thayne, obtusely.
+
+"Suit," replied Olivia, concisely, looking straight forward without
+any air at all.
+
+"Really, we have tried it since they came," said Adelaide, "though
+what people _come_ for is the question, I think, when there isn't
+anything particular to bring them except the neighborhood, and then it
+has to be Christian charity in the neighborhood that didn't ask them
+to pick them up. Mamma called, after a while; and Mrs. Hobart said she
+hoped she would come often, and let _the girls_ run in and be
+sociable! And Grace Hobart says '_she_ hasn't got tired of
+croquet,--she likes it real well!' They're that sort of people, Mr.
+Thayne."
+
+"Oh! that's very bad," said Dakie Thayne, with grave conclusiveness.
+
+"The Haddens had them one night, when we were going to play commerce.
+When we asked them up to the table, they held right back, awfully
+stiff, and couldn't find anything else to say than,--out quite loud,
+across everything,--'O no! they couldn't play commerce; they never
+did; father thought it was just like any gambling game!'"
+
+"Plucky, anyhow," said Harry Goldthwaite.
+
+"I don't think they meant to be rude," said Elinor Hadden. "I think
+they really felt badly; and that was why it blurted right out so. They
+didn't know _what_ to say."
+
+"Evidently," said Olivia. "And one doesn't want to be astonished in
+that way very often."
+
+"I shouldn't mind having them," said Elinor, good-naturedly. "They are
+kind-hearted people, and they would feel hurt to be left out."
+
+"That is just what stopped us," said Adelaide. "That is just what the
+neighborhood is getting to be,--full of people that you don't know
+what to do with."
+
+"I don't see why we _need_ to go out of our own set," said Olivia.
+
+"O dear! O dear!"
+
+It broke from Ruth involuntarily. Then she colored up, as they all
+turned round upon her; but she was excited, and Ruth's excitements
+made her forget that she was Ruth, sometimes, for a moment. It had
+been growing in her, from the beginning of the conversation; and now
+she caught her breath, and felt her eyes light up. She turned her face
+to Leslie Goldthwaite; but although she spoke low she spoke somehow
+clearly, even more than she meant, so that they all heard.
+
+"What if the angels had said that before they came down to Bethlehem!"
+
+Then she knew by the hush that _she_ had astonished them, and she grew
+frightened; but she stood just so, and would not let her look shrink;
+for she still felt just as she did when the words came.
+
+Mrs. Van Alstyne broke the pause with a good-natured laugh.
+
+"We can't go quite back to that, every time," she said. "And we don't
+quite set up to be angels. Come,--try one more round."
+
+And with some of the hoops still hanging upon her arm, she turned to
+pick up the others. Harry Goldthwaite of course sprang forward to do
+it for her; and presently she was tossing them with her peculiar
+grace, till the stake was all wreathed with them from bottom to top,
+the last hoop hanging itself upon the golden ball; a touch more
+dexterous and consummate, it seemed, than if it had fairly slidden
+over upon the rest.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Rosamond knew what a cunning and friendly turn it was; if it had not
+been for Mrs. Van Alstyne, Ruth's speech would have broken up the
+party. As it was, the game began again, and they stayed an hour
+longer.
+
+Not all of them; for as soon as they were fairly engaged, Ruth said to
+Leslie Goldthwaite, "I must go now; I ought to have gone before. Reba
+will be waiting for me. Just tell them, if they ask."
+
+But Leslie and the cadet walked away with her; slowly, across the
+grounds, so that she thought they were going back from the gate; but
+they kept on up over the hill.
+
+"Was it very shocking?" asked Ruth, troubled in her mind. "I could
+not help it; but I was frightened to death the next minute."
+
+"About as frightened as the man is who stands to his gun in the
+front," said Dakie Thayne. "You never flinched."
+
+"They would have thought it was from what I had said," Ruth answered.
+"And _that_ was another thing from the _saying_."
+
+"_You_ had something to say, Leslie. It was just on the corner of your
+lip. I saw it."
+
+"Yes; but Ruth said it all in one flash. It would have spoiled it if I
+had spoken then."
+
+"I'm always sorry for people who don't know how," said Ruth. "I'm sure
+I don't know how myself so often."
+
+"That is just it," said Leslie. "Why shouldn't these girls come up?
+And how will they ever, unless somebody overlooks? They would find out
+these mistakes in a little while, just as they find out fashions:
+picking up the right things from people who do know how. It is a kind
+of leaven, like greater good. And how can we stand anywhere in the
+lump, and say it shall not spread to the next particle?"
+
+"They think it was pushing of them, to come here to live at all," said
+Ruth.
+
+"Well, we're all pushing, if we're good for anything," said Leslie.
+"Why mayn't they push, if they don't crowd out anybody else? It seems
+to me that the wrong sort of pushing is pushing down."
+
+"Only there would be no end to it," said Dakie Thayne, "would there?
+There are coarse, vulgar people always, who are wanting to get in just
+for the sake of being in. What are the nice ones to do?"
+
+"Just _be_ nice, I think," said Leslie. "Nicer with those people than
+with anybody else even. If there weren't any difficulty made about
+it,--if there weren't any keeping out,--they would tire of the
+niceness probably sooner than anything. I don't suppose it is the
+fence that keeps out weeds."
+
+"You are just like Mrs. Ingleside," said Ruth, walking closer to
+Leslie as she spoke.
+
+"And Mrs. Ingleside is like Miss Craydocke: and--I didn't suppose I
+should ever find many more of them, but they're counting up," said
+Dakie Thayne. "There's a pretty good piece of the world salted, after
+all."
+
+"If there really is any best society," pursued Leslie, "it seems to me
+it ought to be, not for keeping people out, but for getting everybody
+in as fast as it can, like the kingdom of heaven."
+
+"Ah, but that _is_ kingdom come," said Dakie Thayne.
+
+It seemed as if the question of "things next" was to arise
+continually, in fresh shapes, just now, when things next for the
+Holabirds were nearer next than ever before.
+
+"We must have Delia Waite again soon, if we can get her," said mother,
+one morning, when we were all quietly sitting in her room, and
+she was cutting out some shirts for Stephen. "All our changes and
+interruptions have put back the sewing so lately."
+
+"We ought not to have been idle so much," said Barbara. "We've been a
+family of grasshoppers all summer."
+
+"Well, the grasshopping has done you all good. I'm not sorry for it,"
+said Mrs. Holabird. "Only we must have Delia for a week now, and be
+busy."
+
+"If Delia Waite didn't have to come to our table!" said Rosamond.
+
+"Why don't you try the girl Mrs. Hadden has, mother? She goes right
+into the kitchen with the other servants."
+
+"I don't believe our 'other servants' would know what to do with her,"
+said Barbara. "There's always such a crowd in our kitchen."
+
+"Barbara, you're a plague!"
+
+"Yes. I'm the thorn in the flesh in this family, lest it should be
+exalted above measure; and like Saint Paul, I magnify mine office."
+
+"In the way we live," said Mrs. Holabird, "it is really more
+convenient to let a seamstress come right to table with us; and
+besides, you know what I think about it. It is a little breath of life
+to a girl like that; she gets something that we can give as well as
+not, and that helps her up. It comes naturally, as it cannot come with
+'other servants.' She sits with us all day; her work is among ladies,
+and with them; she gets something so far, even in the midst of
+measuring and gorings, that common housemaids cannot get; why
+shouldn't she be with us when we can leave off talk of measures and
+gores, and get what Ruth calls the 'very next'? Delia Waite is too
+nice a girl to be put into the kitchen to eat with Katty, in her
+'crowd.'"
+
+"But it seems to set us down; it seems common in us to be so ready to
+be familiar with common people. More in us, because we do live
+plainly. If Mrs. Hadden or Mrs. Marchbanks did it, it might seem kind
+_without_ the common. I think they ought to begin such things."
+
+"But then if they don't? Very likely it would be far more inconvenient
+for them; and not the same good either, because it _would_ be, or
+seem, a condescension. We are the 'very next,' and we must be content
+to be the step we are."
+
+"It's the other thing with us,--con-_as_cension,--isn't it, mother? A
+step up for somebody, and no step down for anybody. Mrs. Ingleside
+does it," Ruth added.
+
+"O, Mrs. Ingleside does all sorts of things. She has _that_ sort of
+position. It's as independent as the other. High moral and high social
+can do anything. It's the betwixt and between that must be careful."
+
+"What a miserably negative set we are, in such a positive state of the
+world!" cried Barbara. "Except Ruth's music, there isn't a specialty
+among us; we haven't any views; we're on the mean-spirited side of the
+Woman Question; 'all woman, and no question,' as mother says; we shall
+never preach, nor speech, nor leech; we can't be magnificent, and we
+won't be common! I don't see what is to become of us, unless--and I
+wonder if maybe that isn't it?--we just do two or three rather right
+things in a no-particular sort of a way."
+
+"Barbara, how nice you are!" cried Ruth.
+
+"No. I'm a thorn. Don't touch me."
+
+"We never have company when we are having sewing done," said Mrs.
+Holabird. "We can always manage that."
+
+"I don't want to play Box and Cox," said Rosamond.
+
+"That's the beauty of you, Rosa Mundi!" said Barbara, warmly. "You
+don't want to _play_ anything. That's where you'll come out sun-clear
+and diamond bright!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+THE "BACK YETT AJEE."
+
+
+Those who do not like common people need not read this chapter.
+
+We had Delia Waite the next week. It happened well, in a sort of
+Box-and-Cox fashion; for Mrs. Van Alstyne went off with some friends
+to the Isles of Shoals, and Alice and Adelaide Marchbanks went with
+her; so that we knew we should see nothing of the two great families
+for a good many days; and when Leslie came, or the Haddens, we did not
+so much mind; besides, they knew that we were busy, and they did not
+expect any "coil" got up for them. Leslie came right up stairs, when
+she was alone; if Harry or Mr. Thayne were with her, one of us would
+take a wristband or a bit of ruffling, and go down. Somehow, if it
+happened to be Harry, Barbara was always tumultuously busy, and never
+offered to receive: but it always ended in Rosamond's making her. It
+seemed to be one of the things that people wait to be overcome in
+their objections to.
+
+We always had a snug, cosey time when Delia was with us; we were all
+simple and busy, and the work was getting on; that was such an
+under-satisfaction; and Delia was having such a good time. She hardly
+ever failed to come to us when we wanted her; she could always make
+some arrangement.
+
+Ruth was artful; she tucked in Lucilla Waters, after all; she said it
+would be such a nice chance to have her; she knew she would rather
+come when we were by ourselves, and especially when we had our work
+and patterns about. Lucilla brought a sack and an overskirt to make;
+she could hardly have been spared if she had had to bring mere idle
+work. She sewed in gathers upon the shirts for mother, while Delia cut
+out her pretty material in a style she had not seen. If we had had
+grasshopper parties all summer before, this was certainly a bee, and I
+think we all really liked it just as well as the other.
+
+We had the comfort of mother's great, airy room, now, as we had never
+even realized it before. Everybody had a window to sit at;
+green-shaded with closed blinds for the most part; but that is so
+beautiful in summer, when the out-of-doors comes brimming in with
+scent and sound, and we know how glorious it is if we choose to open
+to it, and how glorious it is going to be when we do throw all wide in
+the cooling afternoon.
+
+"How glad I am we _have_ to have busy weeks sometimes!" said Ruth,
+stopping the little "common-sense" for an instant, while she tossed a
+long flouncing over her sewing-table. "I know now why people who
+never do their own work are obliged to go away from home for a change.
+It must be dreadfully same if they didn't. I like a book full of
+different stories!"
+
+Lucilla Waters lives down in the heart of the town. So does Leslie
+Goldthwaite, to be sure; but then Mr. Goldthwaite's is one of the old,
+old-fashioned houses that were built when the town was country, and
+that has its great yard full of trees and flowers around it now; and
+Mrs. Waters lives in a block, flat-face to the street, with nothing
+pretty outside, and not very much in; for they have never been rich,
+the Waterses, and Mr. Waters died ten years ago, when Lucilla was a
+little child. Lucilla and her mother keep a little children's school;
+but it was vacation now, of course.
+
+Lucilla is in Mrs. Ingleside's Bible-class; that is how Ruth, and then
+the rest of us, came to know her. Arctura Fish is another of Mrs.
+Ingleside's scholars. She is a poor girl, living at service,--or,
+rather, working in a family for board, clothing, and a little
+"schooling,"--the best of which last she gets on Sundays of Mrs.
+Ingleside,--until she shall have "learned how," and be "worth wages."
+
+Arctura Fish is making herself up, slowly, after the pattern of
+Lucilla Waters. She would not undertake Leslie Goldthwaite or Helen
+Josselyn,--Mrs. Ingleside's younger sister, who stays with her so
+much,--or even our quiet Ruth. But Lucilla Waters comes _just next_.
+She can just reach up to her. She can see how she does up her hair, in
+something approaching the new way, leaning back behind her in the
+class and tracing out the twists between the questions; for Lucilla
+can only afford to use her own, and a few strands of harmless Berlin
+wool under it; she can't buy coils and braids and two-dollar rats, or
+intricacies ready made up at the--upholsterer's, I was going to say.
+So it is not a hopeless puzzle and an impracticable achievement to
+little Arctura Fish. It is wonderful how nice she has made herself
+look lately, and how many little ways she puts on, just like
+Lucilla's. She hasn't got beyond mere mechanical copying, yet; when
+she reaches to where Lucilla really is, she will take in differently.
+
+Ruth gave up her little white room to Delia Waite, and went to sleep
+with Lucilla in the great, square east room.
+
+Delia Waite thought a great deal of this; and it was wonderful how
+nobody could ever get a peep at the room when it looked as if anything
+in it had been used or touched. Ruth is pretty nice about it; but she
+cannot keep it so _sacredly_ fair and pure as Delia did for her. Only
+one thing showed.
+
+"I say," said Stephen, one morning, sliding by Ruth on the stair-rail
+as they came down to breakfast, "do you look after that _piousosity_,
+now, mornings?"
+
+"No," said Ruth, laughing, "of course I can't."
+
+"It's always whopped," said Stephen, sententiously.
+
+Barbara got up some of her special cookery in these days. Not her very
+finest, out of Miss Leslie; she said that was too much like the fox
+and the crane, when Lucilla asked for the receipts. It wasn't fair to
+give a taste of things that we ourselves could only have for very
+best, and send people home to wish for them. But she made some of her
+"griddles trimmed with lace," as only Barbara's griddles were trimmed;
+the brown lightness running out at the edges into crisp filigree. And
+another time it was the flaky spider-cake, turned just as it blushed
+golden-tawny over the coals; and then it was breakfast potato, beaten
+almost frothy with one white-of-egg, a pretty good bit of butter, a
+few spoonfuls of top-of-the-milk, and seasoned plentifully with salt,
+and delicately with pepper,--the oven doing the rest, and turning it
+into a snowy soufflé.
+
+Barbara said we had none of us a specialty; she knew better; only hers
+was a very womanly and old-fashioned, not to say kitcheny one; and
+would be quite at a discount when the grand co-operative kitchens
+should come into play; for who cares to put one's genius into the
+universal and indiscriminate mouth, or make potato-soufflés to be
+carried half a mile to the table?
+
+Barbara delighted to "make company" of seamstress week; "it was so
+nice," she said, "to entertain somebody who thought 'chickings was
+'evingly.'"
+
+Rosamond liked that part of it; she enjoyed giving pleasure no less
+than any; but she had a secret misgiving that we were being very
+vulgarly comfortable in an underhand way. She would never, by any
+means, go off by herself to eat with her fingers.
+
+Delia Waite said she never came to our house that she did not get some
+new ideas to carry home to Arabel.
+
+Arabel Waite was fifty years old, or more; she was the oldest child of
+one marriage and Delia the youngest of another. All the Waites between
+them had dropped away,--out of the world, or into homes here and there
+of their own,--and Arabel and Delia were left together in the square,
+low, gambrel-roofed house over on the other hill, where the town ran
+up small.
+
+Arabel Waite was an old dressmaker. She _could_ make two skirts to a
+dress, one shorter, the other longer; and she could cut out the upper
+one by any new paper pattern; and she could make shell-trimmings and
+flutings and box-plaitings and flouncings, and sew them on
+exquisitely, even now, with her old eyes; but she never had adapted
+herself to the modern ideas of the corsage. She could not fit a bias
+to save her life; she could only stitch up a straight slant, and leave
+the rest to nature and fate. So all her people had the squarest of
+wooden fronts, and were preternaturally large around the waist. Delia
+sewed with her, abroad and at home,--abroad without her, also, as she
+was doing now for us. A pattern for a sleeve, or a cape, or a
+panier,--or a receipt for a tea-biscuit or a johnny-cake, was
+something to go home with rejoicing.
+
+Arabel Waite and Delia could only use three rooms of the old house;
+the rest was blinded and shut up; the garret was given over to the
+squirrels, who came in from the great butternut-trees in the yard, and
+stowed away their rich provision under the eaves and away down between
+the walls, and grew fat there all winter, and frolicked like a troop
+of horse. We liked to hear Delia tell of their pranks, and of all the
+other queer, quaint things in their way of living. Everybody has a way
+of living; and if you can get into it, every one is as good as a
+story. It always seemed to us as if Delia brought with her the
+atmosphere of mysterious old houses, and old, old books stowed away in
+their by-places, and stories of the far past that had been lived
+there, and curious ancient garments done with long ago, and packed
+into trunks and bureaus in the dark, unused rooms, where there had
+been parties once, and weddings and funerals and children's games in
+nurseries; and strange fellowship of little wild things that strayed
+in now,--bees in summer, and squirrels in winter,--and brought the
+woods and fields with them under the old roof. Why, I think we should
+have missed it more than she would, if we had put her into some back
+room, and poked her sewing in at her, and left her to herself!
+
+The only thing that wasn't nice that week was Aunt Roderick coming
+over one morning in the very thick of our work, and Lucilla's too,
+walking straight up stairs, as aunts can, whether you want them or
+not, and standing astonished at the great goings-on.
+
+"Well!" she exclaimed, with a strong falling inflection, "are any of
+you getting ready to be married?"
+
+"Yes'm," said Barbara, gravely, handing her a chair. "All of us."
+
+Then Barbara made rather an unnecessary parade of ribbon that she was
+quilling up, and of black lace that was to go each side of it upon a
+little round jacket for her blue silk dress, made of a piece laid away
+five years ago, when she first had it. The skirt was turned now, and
+the waist was gone.
+
+While Aunt Roderick was there, she also took occasion to toss over,
+more or less, everything that lay about,--"to help her in her
+inventory," she said after she went away.
+
+"Twelve new embroidered cambric handkerchiefs," repeated she, as she
+turned back from the stair-head, having seen Aunt Roderick down.
+
+Barbara had once, in a severe fit of needle-industry, inspired by the
+discovery of two baby robes of linen cambric among mother's old
+treasures, and their bestowal upon her, turned them into these
+elegances, broadly hemmed with the finest machine stitch, and marked
+with beautiful great B's in the corners. She showed them, in her
+pride, to Mrs. Roderick; and we knew afterward what her abstract
+report had been, in Grandfather Holabird's hearing. Grandfather
+Holabird knew we did without a good many things; but he had an
+impression of us, from instances like these, that we were seized with
+sudden spasms of recklessness at times, and rushed into French
+embroideries and sets of jewelry. I believe he heard of mother's one
+handsome black silk, every time she wore it upon semiannual occasions,
+until he would have said that Mrs. Stephen had a new fifty-dollar
+dress every six months. This was one of our little family trials.
+
+"I don't think Mrs. Roderick does it on purpose," Ruth would say. "I
+think there are two things that make her talk in that way. In the
+first place, she has got into the habit of carrying home all the news
+she can, and making it as big as possible, to amuse Mr. Holabird; and
+then she has to settle it over in her own mind, every once in a while,
+that things must be pretty comfortable amongst us, down here, after
+all."
+
+Ruth never dreamed of being satirical; it was a perfectly
+straightforward explanation; and it showed, she truly believed, two
+quite kind and considerate points in Aunt Roderick's character.
+
+After the party came back from the Isles of Shoals, Mrs. Van Alstyne
+went down to Newport. The Marchbankses had other visitors,--people
+whom we did not know, and in whose way we were not thrown; the _haute
+volée_ was sufficient to itself again, and we lived on a piece of our
+own life once more.
+
+"It's rather nice to knit on straight," said Barbara; "without any
+widening or narrowing or counting of stitches. I like very well to
+come to a plain place."
+
+Rosamond never liked the plain places quite so much; but she
+accommodated herself beautifully, and was just as nice as she could
+be. And the very best thing about Rose was, that she never put on
+anything, or left anything off, of her gentle ways and notions. She
+would have been ready at any time for the most delicate fancy-pattern
+that could be woven upon her plain places. That was one thing which
+mother taught us all.
+
+"Your life will come to you; you need not run after it," she would
+say, if we ever got restless and began to think there was no way out
+of the family hedge. "Have everything in yourselves as it should be,
+and then you can take the chances as they arrive."
+
+"Only we needn't put our bonnets on, and sit at the windows," Barbara
+once replied.
+
+"No," said Mrs. Holabird; "and especially at the front windows. A
+great deal that is good--a great deal of the best--comes in at the
+back-doors."
+
+Everybody, we thought, did not have a back-door to their life, as we
+did. They hardly seemed to know if they had one to their houses.
+
+Our "back yett was ajee," now, at any rate.
+
+Leslie Goldthwaite came in at it, though, just the same, and so did
+her cousin and Dakie. [Footnote: Harry Goldthwaite is Leslie's cousin,
+and Mr. Aaron Goldthwaite's ward. I do not believe we have ever
+thought to put this in before.]
+
+Otherwise, for two or three weeks, our chief variety was in sending
+for old Miss Trixie Spring to spend the day.
+
+Miss Trixie Spring is a lively old lady, who, some threescore and five
+years ago, was christened "Beatrix." She plays backgammon in the
+twilights, with mother, and makes a table at whist, at once lively and
+severe, in the evenings, for father. At this whist-table, Barbara
+usually is the fourth. Rosamond gets sleepy over it, and Ruth--Miss
+Trixie says--"plays like a ninkum."
+
+We always wanted Miss Trixie, somehow, to complete comfort, when we
+were especially comfortable by ourselves; when we had something
+particularly good for dinner, or found ourselves set cheerily
+down for a long day at quiet work, with everything early-nice
+about us; or when we were going to make something "contrive-y,"
+"Swiss-family-Robinson-ish," that got us all together over it, in the
+hilarity of enterprise and the zeal of acquisition. Miss Trixie could
+appreciate homely cleverness; darning of carpets and covering of old
+furniture; she could darn a carpet herself, so as almost to improve
+upon--certainly to supplant--the original pattern. Yet she always had
+a fresh amazement for all our performances, as if nothing notable had
+ever been done before, and a personal delight in every one of our
+improvements, as if they had been her own. "We're just as cosey as we
+can be, already,--it isn't that; but we want somebody to tell us how
+cosey we are. Let's get Miss Trixie to-day," says Barbara.
+
+Once was when the new drugget went down, at last, in the dining-room.
+It was tan-color, bound with crimson,--covering three square yards;
+and mother nailed it down with brass-headed tacks, right after
+breakfast, one cool morning. Then Katty washed up the dark
+floor-margin, and the table had its crimson-striped cloth on, and
+mother brought down the brown stuff for the new sofa-cover, and the
+great bunch of crimson braid to bind that with, and we drew up our
+camp-chairs and crickets, and got ready to be busy and jolly, and to
+have a brand-new piece of furniture before night.
+
+Barbara had made peach-dumpling for dinner, and of course Aunt Trixie
+was the last and crowning suggestion. It was not far to send, and she
+was not long in coming, with her second-best cap pinned up in a
+handkerchief, and her knitting-work and her spectacles in her bag.
+
+The Marchbankses never made sofa-covers of brown waterproof, nor had
+Miss Trixies to spend the day. That was because they had no back-door
+to their house.
+
+I suppose you think there are a good many people in our story. There
+are; when we think it up there are ever so many people that have to do
+with our story every day; but we don't mean to tell you all _their_
+stories; so you can bear with the momentary introduction when you meet
+them in our brown room, or in our dining-room, of a morning, although
+we know very well also that passing introductions are going out of
+fashion.
+
+We had Dakie Thayne's last visit that day, in the midst of the
+hammering and binding. Leslie and he came in with Ruth, when she came
+back from her hour with Reba Hadden. It was to bid us good by; his
+furlough was over, he was to return to West Point on Monday.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Another two years' pull," he said. "Won't you all come to West Point
+next summer?"
+
+"If we take the journey we think of," said Barbara, composedly,--"to
+the mountains and Montreal and Quebec; perhaps up the Saguenay; and
+then back, up Lake Champlain, and down the Hudson, on our way to
+Saratoga and Niagara. We might keep on to West Point first, and have a
+day or two there."
+
+"Barbara," said mother, remonstratingly.
+
+"Why? _Don't_ we think of it? I'm sure I do. I've thought of it till
+I'm almost tired of it. I don't much believe we shall come, after all,
+Mr. Thayne."
+
+"We shall miss you very much," said Mrs. Holabird, covering Barbara's
+nonsense.
+
+"Our summer has stopped right in the middle," said Barbara, determined
+to talk.
+
+"I shall hear about you all," said Dakie Thayne. "There's to be a
+Westover column in Leslie's news. I wish--" and there the cadet
+stopped.
+
+Mother looked up at him with a pleasant inquiry.
+
+"I was going to say, I wish there might be a Westover correspondent,
+to put in just a word or two, sometimes; but then I was afraid that
+would be impertinent. When a fellow has only eight weeks in the year
+of living, Mrs. Holabird, and all the rest is drill, you don't know
+how he hangs on to those eight weeks,--and how they hang on to him
+afterwards."
+
+Mother looked so motherly at him then!
+
+"We shall not forget you--Dakie," she said, using his first name for
+the first time. "You shall have a message from us now and then."
+
+Dakie said, "Thank you," in a tone that responded to her "Dakie."
+
+We all knew he liked Mrs. Holabird ever so much. Homes and mothers are
+beautiful things to boys who have had to do without them.
+
+He shook hands with us all round, when he got up to go. He shook hands
+also with our old friend, Miss Trixie, whom he had never happened to
+see before. Then Rosamond went out with him and Leslie,--as it was our
+cordial, countrified fashion for somebody to do,--through the hall to
+the door. Ruth went as far as the stairs, on her way to her room to
+take off her things. She stood there, up two steps, as they were
+leaving.
+
+Dakie Thayne said good by again to Rosamond, at the door, as was
+natural; and then he came quite back, and said it last of all, once
+more, to little Ruth upon the stairs. He certainly did hate to go away
+and leave us all.
+
+"That is a very remarkable pretty-behaved young man," said Miss
+Trixie, when we all picked up our breadths of waterproof, and got in
+behind them again.
+
+"The world is a desert, and the sand has got into my eyes," said
+Barbara, who had hushed up ever since mother had said "Dakie." When
+anybody came close to mother, Barbara was touched. I think her love
+for mother is more like a son's than a daughter's, in the sort of
+chivalry it has with it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was curious how suddenly our little accession of social importance
+had come on, and wonderful how quickly it had subsided; more curious
+and wonderful still, how entirely it seemed to stay subsided.
+
+We had plenty to do, though; we did not miss anything; only we had
+quite taken up with another set of things. This was the way it was
+with us; we had things we _must_ take up; we could not have spared
+time to lead society for a long while together.
+
+Aunt Roderick claimed us, too, in our leisure hours, just then; she
+had a niece come to stay with her; and we had to go over to the "old
+house" and spend afternoons, and ask Aunt Roderick and Miss Bragdowne
+in to tea with us. Aunt Roderick always expected this sort of
+attention; and yet she had a way with her as if we ought not to try to
+afford things, looked scrutinizingly at the quality of our cake and
+preserves, and seemed to eat our bread and butter with consideration.
+
+It helped Rosamond very much, though, over the transition. We, also,
+had had private occupation.
+
+"There had been family company at grandfather's," she told Jeannie
+Hadden, one morning. "We had been very much engaged among ourselves.
+We had hardly seen anything of the other girls for two or three
+weeks."
+
+Barbara sat at the round table, where Stephen had been doing his
+geometry last night, twirling a pair of pencil compasses about on a
+sheet of paper, while this was saying. She lifted up her eyes a
+little, cornerwise, without moving her head, and gave a twinkle of
+mischief over at mother and Ruth. When Jeannie was gone, she kept on
+silently, a few minutes, with her diagrams. Then she said, in her
+funniest, repressed way,--
+
+"I can see a little how it must be; but I suppose I ought to
+understand the differential calculus to compute it. Circles are
+wonderful things; and the science of curves holds almost everything.
+Rose, when do you think we shall get round again?"
+
+She held up her bit of paper as she spoke, scrawled over with
+intersecting circles and arcs and ellipses, against whose curves and
+circumferences she had written names: Marchbanks, Hadden, Goldthwaite,
+Holabird.
+
+"It's a mere question of centre and radius," she said. "You may be big
+enough to take in the whole of them, or you may only cut in at the
+sides. You may be just tangent for a minute, and then go off into
+space on your own account. You may have your centre barely inside of a
+great ring, and yet reach pretty well out of it for a good part; you
+_must_ be small to be taken quite in by anybody's!"
+
+"It doesn't illustrate," said Rose, coolly. "Orbits don't snarl up in
+that fashion."
+
+"Geometry does," said Barbara. "I told you I couldn't work it all out.
+But I suppose there's a Q.E.D. at the end of it somewhere."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two or three days after something new happened; an old thing happened
+freshly, rather,--which also had to do with our orbit and its
+eccentricities. Barbara, as usual, discovered and announced it.
+
+"I should think _any_ kind of an astronomer might be mad!" she
+exclaimed. "Periods and distances are bad enough; but then come the
+perturbations! Here's one. We're used to it, to be sure; but we never
+know exactly where it may come in. The girl we live with has formed
+other views for herself, and is going off at a tangent. What _is_ the
+reason we can't keep a satellite,--planet, I mean?"
+
+"Barbara!" said mother, anxiously, "don't be absurd!"
+
+"Well, what shall I be? We're all out of a place again." And she sat
+down resignedly on a very low cricket, in the middle of the room.
+
+"I'll tell you what we'll do, mother," said Ruth, coming round. "I've
+thought of it this good while. We'll co-operate!"
+
+"She's glad of it! She's been waiting for a chance! I believe she put
+the luminary up to it! Ruth, you're a brick--moon!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+CO-OPERATING.
+
+
+When mother first read that article in the Atlantic she had said,
+right off,--
+
+"I'm sure I wish they would!"
+
+"Would what, mother?" asked Barbara.
+
+"Co-operate."
+
+"O mother! I really do believe you must belong, somehow, to the
+Micawber family! I shouldn't wonder if one of these days, when they
+come into their luck, you should hear of something greatly to your
+advantage, from over the water. You have such faith in 'they'! I don't
+believe '_they_' will ever do much for '_us_'!"
+
+"What is it, dear?" asked Mrs. Hobart, rousing from a little arm-chair
+wink, during which Mrs. Holabird had taken up the magazine.
+
+Mrs. Hobart had come in, with her cable wool and her great ivory
+knitting-pins, to sit an hour, sociably.
+
+"Co-operative housekeeping, ma'am," said Barbara.
+
+"Oh! Yes. That is what they _used_ to have, in old times, when we
+lived at home with mother. Only they didn't write articles about it.
+All the women in a house co-operated--to keep it; and all the
+neighborhood co-operated--by living exactly in the same way.
+Nowadays, it's co-operative shirking; isn't it?"
+
+One never could quite tell whether Mrs. Hobart was more simple or
+sharp.
+
+That was all that was said about co-operative housekeeping at the
+time. But Ruth remembered the conversation. So did Barbara, for a
+while, as appeared in something she came out with a few days after.
+
+"I could--almost--write a little poem!" she said, suddenly, over her
+work. "Only that would be doing just what the rest do. Everything
+turns into a poem, or an article, nowadays. I wish we'd lived in the
+times when people _did_ the things!"
+
+"O Barbara! _Think_ of all that is being done in the world!"
+
+"I know. But the little private things. They want to turn everything
+into a movement. Miss Trixie says they won't have any eggs from their
+fowls next winter; all their chickens are roosters, and all they'll do
+will be to sit in a row on the fence and crow! I think the world is
+running pretty much to roosters."
+
+"Is that the poem?"
+
+"I don't know. It might come in. All I've got is the end of it. It
+came into my head hind side before. If it could only have a beginning
+and a middle put to it, it might do. It's just the wind-up, where they
+have to give an account, you know, and what they'll have to show for
+it, and the thing that really amounts, after all."
+
+"Well, tell us."
+
+"It's only five lines, and one rhyme. But it might be written up to.
+They could say all sorts of things,--one and another:--
+
+        "_I_ wrote some little books;
+          _I_ said some little says;
+        _I_ preached a little preach;
+          _I_ lit a little blaze;
+      _I_ made things pleasant in one little place."
+
+There was a shout at Barbara's "poem."
+
+"I thought I might as well relieve my mind," she said, meekly. "I knew
+it was all there would ever be of it."
+
+But Barbara's rhyme stayed in our heads, and got quoted in the family.
+She illustrated on a small scale what the "poems and articles" _may_
+sometimes do in the great world,
+
+We remembered it that day when Ruth said, "Let's co-operate."
+
+We talked it over,--what we could do without a girl. We had talked it
+over before. We had had to try it, more or less, during interregnums.
+But in our little house in Z----, with the dark kitchen, and with
+Barbara and Ruth going to school, and the washing-days, when we had to
+hire, it always cost more than it came to, besides making what Barb
+called a "heave-offering of life."
+
+"They used to have houses built accordingly," Rosamond said, speaking
+of the "old times." "Grandmother's kitchen was the biggest and
+pleasantest room in the house."
+
+"Couldn't we _make_ the kitchen the pleasantest room?" suggested
+Ruth. "Wouldn't it be sure to be, if it was the room we all stayed in
+mornings, and where we had our morning work? Whatever room we do that
+in always is, you know. The look grows. Kitchens are horrid when girls
+have just gone out of them, and left the dish-towels dirty, and the
+dish-cloth all wabbled up in the sink, and all the tins and irons
+wanting to be cleaned. But if we once got up a real ladies' kitchen of
+our own! I can think how it might be lovely!"
+
+"I can think how it might be jolly-nificent!" cried Barbara, relapsing
+into her dislocations.
+
+"_You_ like kitchens," said Rosamond, in a tone of quiet ill-usedness.
+
+"Yes, I do," said Barbara. "And you like parlors, and prettinesses,
+and feather dusters, and little general touchings-up, that I can't
+have patience with. You shall take the high art, and I'll have the low
+realities. That's the co-operation. Families are put up assorted, and
+the home character comes of it. It's Bible-truth, you know; the head
+and the feet and the eye and the hand, and all that. Let's just see
+what we _shall_ come to! People don't turn out what they're meant, who
+have Irish kitchens and high-style parlors, all alike. There's a great
+deal in being Holabirdy,--or whatever-else-you-are-y!"
+
+"If it only weren't for that cellar-kitchen," said Mrs. Holabird.
+
+"Mother," said Ruth, "what if we were to take this?"
+
+We were in the dining-room.
+
+"This nice room!"
+
+"It is to be a ladies' kitchen, you know."
+
+Everybody glanced around. It was nice, ever so nice. The dark stained
+floor, showing clean, undefaced margins,--the new, pretty
+drugget,--the freshly clad, broad old sofa,--the high wainscoted
+walls, painted in oak and walnut colors, and varnished brightly,--the
+ceiling faintly tinted with buff,--the buff holland shades to the
+windows,--the dresser-closet built out into the room on one side, with
+its glass upper-halves to the doors, showing our prettiest china and a
+gleam of silver and glass,--the two or three pretty engravings in the
+few spaces for them,--O, it was a great deal too nice to take for a
+kitchen.
+
+But Ruth began again.
+
+"You know, mother, before Katty came, how nice everything was down
+stairs. We cooked nearly a fortnight, and washed dishes, and
+everything; and we only had the floor scrubbed once, and there never
+was a slop on the stove, or a teaspoonful of anything spilled. It
+would be so different from a girl! It seems as if we _might_ bring the
+kitchen up stairs, instead of going down into the kitchen."
+
+"But the stove," said mother.
+
+"I think," said Barbara, boldly, "that a cooking-stove, all polished
+up, is just as handsome a thing as there is in a house!"
+
+"It is clumsy, one must own," said Mrs. Holabird, "besides being
+suggestive."
+
+"So is a piano," said the determined Barbara.
+
+"I can _imagine_ a cooking-stove," said Rosamond, slowly.
+
+"Well, do! That's just where your gift will come in!"
+
+"A pretty copper tea-kettle, and a shiny tin boiler, made to
+order,--like an urn, or something,--with a copper faucet, and nothing
+else ever about, except it were that minute wanted; and all the tins
+and irons begun with new again, and kept clean; and little cocoanut
+dippers with German silver rims; and things generally contrived as
+they are for other kinds of rooms that ladies use; it _might_ be like
+that little picnicking dower-house we read about in a novel, or like
+Marie Antoinette's Trianon."
+
+"That's what it _would_ come to, if it was part of our living, just as
+we come to have gold thimbles and lovely work-boxes. We should give
+each other Christmas and birthday presents of things; we should have
+as much pleasure and pride in it as in the china-closet. Why, the
+whole trouble is that the kitchen is the only place taste _hasn't_ got
+into. Let's have an art-kitchen!"
+
+"We might spend a little money in fitting up a few things freshly, if
+we are to save the waste and expense of a servant," said Mrs.
+Holabird.
+
+The idea grew and developed.
+
+"But when we have people to tea!" Rosamond said, suddenly demurring
+afresh.
+
+"There's always the brown room, and the handing round," said Barbara,
+"for the people you can't be intimate with, and _think_ how crowsy
+this will be with Aunt Trixie or Mrs. Hobart or the Goldthwaites!"
+
+"We shall just settle _down_," said Rose, gloomily.
+
+"Well, I believe in finding our place. Every little brook runs till it
+does that. I don't want to stand on tip-toe all my life."
+
+"We shall always gather to us what _belongs_. Every little crystal
+does that," said mother, taking up another simile.
+
+"What will Aunt Roderick say?" said Ruth.
+
+"I shall keep her out of the kitchen, and tell her we couldn't manage
+with one girl any longer, and so we've taken three that all wanted to
+get a place together."
+
+And Barbara actually did; and it was three weeks before Mrs. Roderick
+found out what it really meant.
+
+We were in a hurry to have Katty go, and to begin, after we had made
+up our minds; and it was with the serenest composure that Mrs.
+Holabird received her remark that "her week would be up a-Tuesday, an'
+she hoped agin then we'd be shooted wid a girl."
+
+"Yes, Katty; I am ready at any moment," was the reply; which caused
+the whites of Katty's eyes to appear for a second between the lids and
+the irids.
+
+There had been only one applicant for the place, who had come while we
+had not quite irrevocably fixed our plans.
+
+Mother swerved for a moment; she came in and told us what the girl
+said.
+
+"She is not experienced; but she looks good-natured; and she is
+willing to come for a trial."
+
+"They all do that," said Barbara, gravely. "I think--as
+Protestants--we've hired enough of them."
+
+Mother laughed, and let the "trial" go. That was the end, I think, of
+our indecisions.
+
+We got Mrs. Dunikin to come and scrub; we pulled out pots and pans,
+stove-polish and dish-towels, napkins and odd stockings missed from
+the wash; we cleared every corner, and had every box and bottle
+washed; then we left everything below spick and span, so that it
+almost tempted us to stay even there, and sent for the sheet-iron man,
+and had the stove taken up stairs. We only carried up such lesser
+movables as we knew we should want; we left all the accumulation
+behind; we resolved to begin life anew, and feel our way, and furnish
+as we went along.
+
+Ruth brought home a lovely little spice-box as the first donation to
+the art-kitchen. Father bought a copper tea-kettle, and the sheet-iron
+man made the tin boiler. There was a wide, high, open fireplace in the
+dining-room; we had wondered what we should do with it in the winter.
+It had a soapstone mantel, with fluted pilasters, and a brown-stone
+hearth and jambs. Back a little, between these sloping jambs, we had a
+nice iron fire-board set, with an ornamental collar around the
+funnel-hole. The stove stood modestly sheltered, as it were, in its
+new position, its features softened to almost a sitting-room
+congruity; it did not thrust itself obtrusively forward, and force its
+homely association upon you; it was low, too, and its broad top looked
+smooth and enticing.
+
+There was a large, light closet at the back of the room, where was set
+a broad, deep iron sink, and a pump came up from the cistern. This
+closet had double sliding doors; it could be thrown all open for busy
+use, or closed quite away and done with.
+
+There were shelves here, and cupboards. Here we ranged our tins and
+our saucepans,--the best and newest; Rosamond would have nothing
+to do with the old battered ones; over them we hung our spoons
+and our little strainers, our egg-beaters, spatulas, and quart
+measures,--these last polished to the brightness of silver tankards;
+in one corner stood the flour-barrel, and over it was the sieve; in
+the cupboards were our porcelain kettles,--we bought two new ones, a
+little and a big,--the frying-pans, delicately smooth and nice now,
+outside and in, the roasting-pans, and the one iron pot, which we
+never meant to use when we could help it. The worst things we could
+have to wash were the frying and roasting pans, and these, we soon
+found, were not bad when you did it all over and at once every time.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Adjoining this closet was what had been the "girl's room," opening
+into the passage where the kitchen stairs came up, and the passage
+itself was fair-sized and square, corresponding to the depth of the
+other divisions. Here we had a great box placed for wood, and a barrel
+for coal, and another for kindlings; once a week these could be
+replenished as required, when the man came who "chored" for us. The
+"girl's room" would be a spare place that we should find twenty uses
+for; it was nice to think of it sweet and fresh, empty and available;
+very nice not to be afraid to remember it was there at all.
+
+We had a Robinson-Crusoe-like pleasure in making all these
+arrangements; every clean thing that we put in a spotless place upon
+shelf or nail was a wealth and a comfort to us. Besides, we really did
+not need half the lumber of a common kitchen closet; a china bowl or
+plate would no longer be contraband of war, and Barbara said she could
+stir her blanc-mange with a silver spoon without demoralizing anybody
+to the extent of having the ashes taken up with it.
+
+By Friday night we had got everything to the exact and perfect
+starting-point; and Mrs. Dunikin went home enriched with gifts that
+were to her like a tin-and-wooden wedding; we felt, on our part, that
+we had celebrated ours by clearing them out.
+
+The bread-box was sweet and empty; the fragments had been all daintily
+crumbled by Ruth, as she sat, resting and talking, when she had come
+in from her music-lesson; they lay heaped up like lightly fallen snow,
+in a broad dish, ready to be browned for chicken dressing or boiled
+for brewis or a pudding. Mother never has anything between loaves and
+crumbs when _she_ manages; then all is nice, and keeps nice.
+
+"Clean beginnings are beautiful," said Rosamond, looking around. "It
+is the middle that's horrid."
+
+"We won't have any middles," said Ruth. "We'll keep making clean
+beginnings, all the way along. That is the difference between work and
+muss."
+
+"If you can," said Rose, doubtfully.
+
+I suppose that is what some people will say, after this Holabird story
+is printed so far. Then we just wish they could have seen mother make
+a pudding or get a breakfast, that is all. A lady will no more make
+a jumble or litter in doing such things than she would at her
+dressing-table. It only needs an accustomed and delicate touch.
+
+I will tell you something of how it was, I will take that Monday
+morning--and Monday morning is as good, for badness, as you can
+take--just after we had begun.
+
+The room was nice enough for breakfast when we left it over night.
+There was nothing straying about; the tea-kettle and the tin boiler
+were filled,--father did that just before he locked up the house; we
+had only to draw up the window-shades, and let the sweet light in, in
+the morning.
+
+Stephen had put a basket of wood and kindlings ready for Mrs. Dunikin
+in the kitchen below, and the key of the lower door had been left on a
+beam in the woodshed, by agreement. By the time we came down stairs
+Mrs. Dunikin had a steaming boiler full of clothes, and had done
+nearly two of her five hours' work. We should hand her her breakfast
+on a little tray, when the time came, at the stair-head; and she would
+bring up her cup and plate again while we were clearing away. We
+should pay her twelve and a half cents an hour; she would scrub up all
+below, go home to dinner, and come again to-morrow for five hours'
+ironing. That was all there would be about Mrs. Dunikin.
+
+Meanwhile, with a pair of gloves on, and a little plain-hemmed
+three-cornered, dotted-muslin cap tied over her hair with a muslin bow
+behind, mother had let down the ashes,--it isn't a bad thing to do
+with a well-contrived stove,--and set the pan, to which we had a
+duplicate, into the out-room, for Stephen to carry away. Then into the
+clean grate went a handful of shavings and pitch-pine kindlings, one
+or two bits of hard wood, and a sprinkle of small, shiny nut-coal. The
+draughts were put on, and in five minutes the coals were red. In these
+five minutes the stove and the mantel were dusted, the hearth brushed
+up, and there was neither chip nor mote to tell the tale. It was not
+like an Irish fire, that reaches out into the middle of the room with
+its volcanic margin of cinders and ashes.
+
+Then--that Monday morning--we had brewis to make, a little buttered
+toast to do, and some eggs to scramble. The bright coffee-pot got its
+ration of fragrant, beaten paste,--the brown ground kernels mixed with
+an egg,--and stood waiting for its drink of boiling water. The two
+frying-pans came forth; one was set on with the milk for the brewis,
+into which, when it boiled up white and drifting, went the sweet fresh
+butter, and the salt, each in plentiful proportion;--"one can give
+one's self _carte-blancher_," Barbara said, "than it will do to give a
+girl";--and then the bread-crumbs; and the end of it was, in a white
+porcelain dish, a light, delicate, savory bread-porridge, to eat
+daintily with a fork, and be thankful for. The other pan held eggs,
+broken in upon bits of butter, and sprinkles of pepper and salt; this
+went on when the coffee-pot--which had got its drink when the milk
+boiled, and been puffing ever since--was ready to come off; over it
+stood Barbara with a tin spoon, to toss up and turn until the whole
+was just curdled with the heat into white and yellow flakes, not one
+of which was raw, nor one was dry. Then the two pans and the
+coffee-pot and the little bowl in which the coffee-paste had been
+beaten and the spoons went off into the pantry-closet, and the
+breakfast was ready; and only Barbara waited a moment to toast and
+butter the bread, while mother, in her place at table, was serving the
+cups. It was Ruth who had set the table, and carried off the cookery
+things, and folded and slid back the little pembroke, that had held
+them beside the stove, into its corner.
+
+Rosamond had been busy in the brown room; that was all nice now for
+the day; and she came in with a little glass vase in her hand, in
+which was a tea-rose, that she put before mother at the edge of the
+white waiter-napkin; and it graced and freshened all the place; and
+the smell of it, and the bright September air that came in at the
+three cool west windows, overbore all remembrance of the cooking and
+reminder of the stove, from which we were seated well away, and before
+which stood now a square, dark green screen that Rosamond had
+recollected and brought down from the garret on Saturday. Barbara and
+her toast emerged from its shelter as innocent of behind-the-scenes as
+any bit of pretty play or pageant.
+
+Barbara looked very nice this morning, in her brown-plaid Scotch
+gingham trimmed with white braids; she had brown slippers, also, with
+bows; she would not verify Rosamond's prophecy that she "would be all
+points," now that there was an apology for them. I think we were all
+more particular about our outer ladyhood than usual.
+
+After breakfast the little pembroke was wheeled out again, and on it
+put a steaming pan of hot water. Ruth picked up the dishes; it was
+something really delicate to see her scrape them clean, with a pliant
+knife, as a painter might cleanse his palette,--we had, in fact, a
+palette-knife that we kept for this use when we washed our own
+dishes,--and then set them in piles and groups before mother, on the
+pembroke-table. Mother sat in her raised arm-chair, as she might sit
+making tea for company; she had her little mop, and three long, soft
+clean towels lay beside her; we had hemmed a new dozen, so as to have
+plenty from day to day, and a grand Dunikin wash at the end on the
+Mondays.
+
+After the china and glass were done and put up, came forth the
+coffee-pot and the two pans, and had their scald, and their little
+scour,--a teaspoonful of sand must go to the daily cleansing of an
+iron utensil, in mother's hands; and _that_ was clean work, and the
+iron thing never got to be "horrid," any more than a china bowl. It
+was only a little heavy, and it was black; but the black did not come
+off. It is slopping and burning and putting away with a rinse, that
+makes kettles and spiders untouchable. Besides, mother keeps a bottle
+of ammonia in the pantry, to qualify her soap and water with, when she
+comes to things like these. She calls it her kitchen-maid; it does
+wonders for any little roughness or greasiness; such soil comes off in
+that, and chemically disappears.
+
+It was all dining-room work; and we were chatty over it, as if we had
+sat down to wind worsteds; and there was no kitchen in the house that
+morning.
+
+We kept our butter and milk in the brick buttery at the foot of the
+kitchen stairs. These were all we had to go up and down for. Barbara
+set away the milk, and skimmed the cream, and brought up and scalded
+the yesterday's pans the first thing; and they were out in a
+row--flashing up saucily at the sun and giving as good as he sent--on
+the back platform.
+
+She and Rosamond were up stairs, making beds and setting straight; and
+in an hour after breakfast the house was in its beautiful forenoon
+order, and there was a forenoon of three hours to come.
+
+We had chickens for dinner that day, I remember; one always does
+remember what was for dinner the first day in a new house, or in new
+housekeeping. William, the chore-man, had killed and picked and drawn
+them, on Saturday; I do not mean to disguise that we avoided these
+last processes; we preferred a little foresight of arrangement. They
+were hanging in the buttery, with their hearts and livers inside them;
+mother does not believe in gizzards. They only wanted a little salt
+bath before cooking.
+
+I should like to have had you see Mrs. Holabird tie up those chickens.
+They were as white and nice as her own hands; and their legs and wings
+were fastened down to their sides, so that they were as round and
+comfortable as dumplings before she had done with them; and she laid
+them out of her two little palms into the pan in a cunning and cosey
+way that gave them a relish beforehand, and sublimated the vulgar
+need.
+
+We were tired of sewing and writing and reading in three hours; it
+was only restful change to come down and put the chickens into the
+oven, and set the dinner-table.
+
+Then, in the broken hour while they were cooking, we drifted out upon
+the piazza, and among our plants in the shady east corner by the
+parlor windows, and Ruth played a little, and mother took up the
+Atlantic, and we felt we had a good right to the between-times when
+the fresh dredgings of flour were getting their brown, and after that,
+while the potatoes were boiling.
+
+Barbara gave us currant-jelly; she was a stingy Barbara about that
+jelly, and counted her jars; and when father and Stephen came in,
+there was the little dinner of three covers, and a peach-pie of
+Saturday's making on the side-board, and the green screen up before
+the stove again, and the baking-pan safe in the pantry sink, with hot
+water and ammonia in it.
+
+"Mother," said Barbara, "I feel as if we had got rid of a menagerie!"
+
+"It is the girl that makes the kitchen," said Ruth.
+
+"And then the kitchen that has to have the girl," said Mrs. Holabird.
+
+Ruth got up and took away the dishes, and went round with the
+crumb-knife, and did not forget to fill the tumblers, nor to put on
+father's cheese.
+
+Our talk went on, and we forgot there was any "tending."
+
+"We didn't feel all that in the ends of our elbows," said mother in a
+low tone, smiling upon Ruth as she sat down beside her.
+
+"Nor have to scrinch all up," said Stephen, quite out loud, "for fear
+she'd touch us!"
+
+I'll tell you--in confidence--another of our ways at Westover; what,
+we did, mostly, after the last two meals, to save our afternoons and
+evenings and our nice dresses. We always did it with the tea-things.
+We just put them, neatly piled and ranged in that deep pantry sink; we
+poured some dipperfuls of hot water over them, and shut the cover
+down; and the next morning, in our gingham gowns, we did up all the
+dish-washing for the day.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Who folded all those clothes?" Why, we girls, of course. But you
+can't be told everything in one chapter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+SPRINKLES AND GUSTS.
+
+
+Mrs. Dunikin used to bring them in, almost all of them, and leave them
+heaped up in the large round basket. Then there was the second-sized
+basket, into which they would all go comfortably when they were folded
+up.
+
+One Monday night we went down as usual; some of us came in,--for we
+had been playing croquet until into the twilight, and the Haddens had
+just gone away, so we were later than usual at our laundry work.
+Leslie and Harry went round with Rosamond to the front door; Ruth
+slipped in at the back, and mother came down when she found that
+Rosamond had not been released. Barbara finished setting the
+tea-table, which she had a way of doing in a whiff, put on the sweet
+loaf upon the white trencher, and the dish of raspberry jam and the
+little silver-wire basket of crisp sugar-cakes, and then there was
+nothing but the tea, which stood ready for drawing in the small
+Japanese pot. Tea was nothing to get, ever.
+
+"Mother, go back again! You tired old darling, Ruth and I are going to
+do these!" and Barbara plunged in among the "blossoms."
+
+That was what we called the fresh, sweet-smelling white things. There
+are a great many pretty pieces of life, if you only know about them.
+Hay-making is one; and rose-gathering is one; and sprinkling and
+folding a great basket full of white clothes right out of the grass
+and the air and the sunshine is one.
+
+Mother went off,--chiefly to see that Leslie and Harry were kept to
+tea, I believe. She knew how to compensate, in her lovely little
+underhand way, with Barbara.
+
+Barbara pinned up her muslin sleeves to the shoulder, shook out a
+little ruffled short-skirt and put it on for an apron, took one end of
+the long white ironing-table that stood across the window, pushed the
+water-basin into the middle, and began with the shirts and the
+starched things. Ruth, opposite, was making the soft underclothing
+into little white rolls.
+
+Barbara dampened and smoothed and stretched; she almost ironed with
+her fingers, Mrs. Dunikin said. She patted and evened, laid collars
+and cuffs one above another with a sprinkle of drops, just from her
+finger-ends, between, and then gave a towel a nice equal shower with a
+corn-whisk that she used for the large things, and rolled them up in
+it, hard and fast, with a thump of her round pretty fist upon the
+middle before she laid it by. It was a clever little process to
+watch; and her arms were white in the twilight. Girls can't do all the
+possible pretty manoeuvres in the German or out at croquet, if they
+only once knew it. They do find it out in a one-sided sort of way: and
+then they run to private theatricals. But the real every-day scenes
+are just as nice, only they must have their audiences in ones and
+twos; perhaps not always any audience at all.
+
+Of a sudden Ruth became aware of an audience of one.
+
+Upon the balcony, leaning over the rail, looking right down into the
+nearest kitchen window and over Barbara's shoulder, stood Harry
+Goldthwaite. He shook his head at Ruth, and she held her peace.
+
+Barbara began to sing. She never sang to the piano,--only about her
+work. She made up little snatches, piecemeal, of various things, and
+put them to any sort of words. This time it was to her own,--her poem.
+
+           "I wrote some little books;
+             I said some little says;
+           I preached a little pre-e-each;
+             I lit a little blaze;
+    I made--things--pleasant--in one--little--place."
+
+She ran down a most contented little trip, with repeats and returns,
+in a G-octave, for the last line. Then she rolled up a bundle of
+shirts in a square pillow-case, gave it its accolade, and pressed it
+down into the basket.
+
+"How do you suppose, Ruth, we shall manage the town-meetings? Do you
+believe they will be as nice as this? Where shall we get our little
+inspirations, after we have come out of all our corners?"
+
+"We won't do it," said Ruth, quietly, shaking out one of mother's
+nightcaps, and speaking under the disadvantage of her private
+knowledge.
+
+"I think they ought to let us vote just once," said Barbara; "to say
+whether we ever would again. I believe we're in danger of being put
+upon now, if we never were before."
+
+"It isn't fair," said Ruth, with her eyes up out of the window at
+Harry, who made noiseless motion of clapping his hands. How could she
+tell what Barbara would say next, or how she would like it when she
+knew?
+
+"Of course it isn't," said Barbara, intent upon the gathers of a white
+cambric waist of Rosamond's. "I wonder, Ruth, if we shall have to read
+all those Pub. Doc.s that father gets. You see women will make awful
+hard work of it, if they once do go at it; they are so used to doing
+every--little--thing"; and she picked out the neck-edging, and
+smoothed the hem between the buttons.
+
+"We shall have to take vows, and devote ourselves to it," Barbara went
+on, as if she were possessed. "There will have to be 'Sisters of
+Polity.' Not that I ever will. I don't feel a vocation. I'd rather be
+a Polly-put-the-kettle-on all the days of my life."
+
+"Mr. Goldthwaite!" said Ruth.
+
+"May I?" asked Harry, as if he had just come, leaning down over the
+rail, and speaking to Barbara, who faced about with a jump.
+
+She knew by his look; he could not keep in the fun.
+
+"'_May_ you'? When you have, already!"
+
+"O no, I haven't! I mean, come down? Into the one-pleasant-little-place,
+and help?"
+
+"You don't know the way," Barbara said, stolidly, turning back again,
+and folding up the waist.
+
+"Don't I? Which,--to come down, or to help?" and Harry flung himself
+over the rail, clasped one hand and wrist around a copper water-pipe
+that ran down there, reached the other to something-above the
+window,--the mere pediment, I believe,--and swung his feet lightly to
+the sill beneath. Then he dropped himself and sat down, close by
+Barbara's elbow.
+
+"You'll get sprinkled," said she, flourishing the corn-whisk over a
+table-cloth.
+
+"I dare say. Or patted, or punched, or something. I knew I took the
+risk of all that when I came down amongst it. But it looked nice. I
+couldn't help it, and I don't care!"
+
+Barbara was thinking of two things,--how long he had been there, and
+what in the world she had said besides what she remembered; and--how
+she should get off her rough-dried apron.
+
+"Which do you want,--napkins or pillow-cases?" and he came round to
+the basket, and began to pull out.
+
+"Napkins," says Barbara.
+
+The napkins were underneath, and mixed up; while he stooped and
+fumbled, she had the ruffled petticoat off over her head. She gave it
+a shower in such a hurry, that as Harry came up with the napkins, he
+did get a drift of it in his face.
+
+"That won't do," said Barbara, quite shocked, and tossing the whisk
+aside. "There are too many of us."
+
+She began on the napkins, sprinkling with her fingers. Harry spread up
+a pile on his part, dipping also into the bowl. "I used to do it when
+I was a little boy," he said.
+
+Ruth took the pillow-cases, and so they came to the last. They
+stretched the sheets across the table, and all three had a hand in
+smoothing and showering.
+
+"Why, I wish it weren't all done," says Harry, turning over three
+clothes-pins in the bottom of the basket, while Barbara buttoned her
+sleeves. "Where does this go? What a nice place this is!" looking
+round the clean kitchen, growing shadowy in the evening light. "I
+think your house is full of nice places."
+
+"Are you nearly ready, girls?" came in mother's voice from above.
+
+"Yes, ma'am," Harry answered back, in an excessively cheery way.
+"We're coming"; and up the stairs all three came together, greatly to
+Mrs. Holabird's astonishment.
+
+"You never know where help is coming from when you're trying to do
+your duty," said Barbara, in a high-moral way. "Prince Percinet, Mrs.
+Holabird."
+
+"Miss Polly-put--" began Harry Goldthwaite, brimming up with a
+half-diffident mischief. But Barbara walked round to her place at the
+table with a very great dignity.
+
+People think that young folks can only have properly arranged and
+elaborately provided good times; with Germania band pieces, and
+bouquets and ribbons for the German, and oysters and salmon-salad and
+sweatmeat-and-spun-sugar "chignons"; at least, commerce games and
+bewitching little prizes. Yet when lives just touch each other
+naturally, as it were,--dip into each other's little interests and
+doings, and take them as they are, what a multiplication-table of
+opportunities it opens up! You may happen upon a good time any
+minute, then. Neighborhoods used to go on in that simple fashion; life
+used to be "co-operative."
+
+Mother said something like that after Leslie and Harry had gone away.
+
+"Only you can't get them into it again," objected Rosamond. "It's a
+case of Humpty Dumpty. The world will go on."
+
+"_One_ world will," said Barbara. "But the world is manifold. You can
+set up any kind of a monad you like, and a world will shape itself
+round it. You've just got to live your own way, and everything that
+belongs to it will be sure to join on. You'll have a world before you
+know it. I think myself that's what the Ark means, and Mount Ararat,
+and the Noachian--don't they call it?--new foundation. That's the way
+they got up New England, anyhow."
+
+"Barbara, what flights you take!"
+
+"Do I? Well, we have to. The world lives up nineteen flights now, you
+know, besides the old broken-down and buried ones."
+
+It was a few days after that, that the news came to mother of Aunt
+Radford's illness, and she had to go up to Oxenham. Father went with
+her, but he came back the same night. Mother had made up her mind to
+stay a week. And so we had to keep house without her.
+
+One afternoon Grandfather Holabird came down. I don't know why, but if
+ever mother did happen to be out of the way, it seemed as if he took
+the time to talk over special affairs with father. Yet he thought
+everything of "Mrs. Stephen," too, and he quite relied upon her
+judgment and influence. But I think old men do often feel as if they
+had got their sons back again, quite to themselves, when the Mrs.
+Stephens or the Mrs. Johns leave them alone for a little.
+
+At any rate, Grandfather Holabird sat with father on the north piazza,
+out of the way of the strong south-wind; and he had out a big wallet,
+and a great many papers, and he stayed and stayed, from just after
+dinner-time till almost the middle of the afternoon, so that father
+did not go down to his office at all; and when old Mr. Holabird went
+home at last, he walked over with him. Just after they had gone Leslie
+Goldthwaite and Harry stopped, "for a minute only," they said; for the
+south-wind had brought up clouds, and there was rain threatening. That
+was how we all happened to be just as we were that night of the
+September gale; for it was the September gale of last year that was
+coming.
+
+The wind had been queer, in gusts, all day; yet the weather had been
+soft and mild. We had opened windows for the pleasant air, and shut
+them again in a hurry when the papers blew about, and the pictures
+swung to and fro against the walls. Once that afternoon, somebody had
+left doors open through the brown room and the dining-room, where a
+window was thrown up, as we could have it there where the three were
+all on one side. Ruth was coming down stairs, and saw grandfather's
+papers give a whirl out of his lap and across the piazza floor upon
+the gravel. If she had not sprung so quickly and gathered them all up
+for him, some of them might have blown quite away, and led father a
+chase after them over the hill. After that, old Mr. Holabird put them
+up in his wallet again, and when they had talked a few minutes more
+they went off together to the old house.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It was wonderful how that wind and rain did come up. The few minutes
+that Harry and Leslie stopped with us, and then the few more they took
+to consider whether it would do for Leslie to try to walk home, just
+settled it that nobody could stir until there should be some sort of
+lull or holding up.
+
+Out of the far southerly hills came the blast, rending and crashing;
+the first swirls of rain that flung themselves against our windows
+seemed as if they might have rushed ten miles, horizontally, before
+they got a chance to drop; the trees bent down and sprang again, and
+lashed the air to and fro; chips and leaves and fragments of all
+strange sorts took the wonderful opportunity and went soaring aloft
+and onward in a false, plebeian triumph.
+
+The rain came harder, in great streams; but it all went by in white,
+wavy drifts; it seemed to rain from south to north across the
+country,--not to fall from heaven to earth; we wondered if it _would_
+fall anywhere. It beat against the house; that stood up in its way; it
+rained straight in at the window-sills and under the doors; we ran
+about the house with cloths and sponges to sop it up from cushions and
+carpets.
+
+"I say, Mrs. Housekeeper!" called out Stephen from above, "look out
+for father's dressing-room! It's all afloat,--hair-brushes out on
+voyages of discovery, and a horrid little kelpie sculling round on a
+hat-box!"
+
+Father's dressing-room was a windowed closet, in the corner space
+beside the deep, old-fashioned chimney. It had hooks and shelves in
+one end, and a round shaving-stand and a chair in the other. We had to
+pull down all his clothes and pile them upon chairs, and stop up the
+window with an old blanket. A pane was cracked, and the wind, although
+its force was slanted here, had blown it in, and the fine driven spray
+was dashed across, diagonally, into the very farthest corner.
+
+In the room a gentle cascade descended beside the chimney, and a
+picture had to be taken down. Down stairs the dining-room sofa,
+standing across a window, got a little lake in the middle of it before
+we knew. The side door blew open with a bang, and hats, coats, and
+shawls went scurrying from their pegs, through sitting-room and hall,
+like a flight of scared, living things. We were like a little garrison
+in a great fort, besieged at all points at once. We had to bolt
+doors,--latches were nothing,--and bar shutters. And when we could
+pause indoors, what a froth and whirl we had to gaze out at!
+
+The grass, all along the fields, was white, prostrate; swept fiercely
+one way; every blade stretched out helpless upon its green face. The
+little pear-trees, heavy with fruit, lay prone in literal "windrows."
+The great ashes and walnuts twisted and writhed, and had their
+branches stripped upward of their leaves, as a child might draw a head
+of blossoming grass between his thumb and finger. The beautiful elms
+were in a wild agony; their graceful little bough-tips were all
+snapped off and whirled away upon the blast, leaving them in a ragged
+blight. A great silver poplar went over by the fence, carrying the
+posts and palings with it, and upturned a huge mass of roots and
+earth, that had silently cemented itself for half a century beneath
+the sward. Up and down, between Grandfather Holabird's home-field and
+ours, fallen locusts and wild cherry-trees made an abatis. Over and
+through all swept the smiting, powdery, seething storm of waters; the
+air was like a sea, tossing and foaming; we could only see through it
+by snatches, to cry out that this and that had happened. Down below
+us, the roof was lifted from a barn, and crumpled up in a heap half a
+furlong off, against some rocks; and the hay was flying in great locks
+through the air.
+
+It began to grow dark. We put a bright, steady light in the brown
+room, to shine through the south window, and show father that we were
+all right; directly after a lamp was set in Grandfather Holabird's
+north porch. This little telegraphy was all we could manage; we were
+as far apart as if the Atlantic were between us.
+
+"Will they be frightened about you at home?" asked Ruth of Leslie.
+
+"I think not. They will know we should go in somewhere, and that
+there would be no way of getting out again. People must be caught
+everywhere, just as it happens, to-night."
+
+"It's just the jolliest turn-up!" cried Stephen, who had been in an
+ecstasy all the time. "Let's make molasses-candy, and sit up all
+night!"
+
+Between eight and nine we had some tea. The wind had lulled a little
+from its hurricane force; the rain had stopped.
+
+"It had all been blown to Canada, by this time," Harry Goldthwaite
+said. "That rain never stopped anywhere short, except at the walls and
+windows."
+
+True enough, next morning, when we went out, the grass was actually
+dry.
+
+It was nearly ten when Stephen went to the south window and put his
+hands up each side of his face against the glass, and cried out that
+there was a lantern coming over from grandfather's. Then we all went
+and looked.
+
+It came slowly; once or twice it stopped; and once it moved down hill
+at right angles quite a long way. "That is where the trees are down,"
+we said. But presently it took an unobstructed diagonal, and came
+steadily on to the long piazza steps, and up to the side door that
+opened upon the little passage to the dining-room.
+
+We thought it was father, of course, and we all hurried to the door to
+let him in, and at the same time to make it nearly impossible that he
+should enter at all. But it was Grandfather Holabird's man, Robert.
+
+"The old gentleman has been taken bad," he said. "Mr. Stephen wants to
+know if you're all comfortable, and he won't come till Mr. Holabird's
+better. I've got to go to the town for the doctor."
+
+"On foot, Robert?"
+
+"Sure. There's no other way. I take it there's many a good winter's
+firing of wood down across the road atwixt here and there. There ain't
+much knowing where you _can_ get along."
+
+"But what is it?"
+
+"We mustn't keep him," urged Barbara.
+
+"No, I ain't goin' to be kep'. 'T won't do. I donno what it is. It's a
+kind of a turn. He's comin' partly out of it; but it's bad. He had a
+kind of a warnin' once before. It's his head. They're afraid it's
+appalectic, or paralettic, or sunthin'."
+
+Robert looked very sober. He quite passed by the wonder of the gale,
+that another time would have stirred him to most lively speech. Robert
+"thought a good deal," as he expressed it, of Grandfather Holabird.
+
+Harry Goldthwaite came through the brown room with his hat in his
+hand. How he ever found it we could not tell.
+
+"I'll go with him," he said. "You won't be afraid now, will you,
+Barbara? I'm _very_ sorry about Mr. Holabird."
+
+He shook hands with Barbara,--it chanced that she stood
+nearest,--bade us all good night, and went away. We turned back
+silently into the brown room.
+
+We were all quite hushed from our late excitement. What strange things
+were happening to-night!
+
+All in a moment something so solemn and important was put into our
+minds. An event that,--never talked about, and thought of as little, I
+suppose, as such a one ever was in any family like ours,--had yet
+always loomed vaguely afar, as what should come some time, and would
+bring changes when it came, was suddenly impending.
+
+Grandfather might be going to die.
+
+And yet what was there for us to do but to go quietly back into the
+brown room and sit down?
+
+There was nothing to say even. There never is anything to say about
+the greatest things. People can only name the bare, grand, awful fact,
+and say, "It was tremendous," or "startling," or "magnificent," or
+"terrible," or "sad." How little we could really say about the gale,
+even now that it was over! We could repeat that this and that tree
+were blown down, and such a barn or house unroofed; but we could not
+get the real wonder of it--the thing that moved us to try to talk it
+over--into any words.
+
+"He seemed so well this afternoon," said Rosamond.
+
+"I don't think he _was_ quite well," said Ruth. "His hands trembled so
+when he was folding up his papers; and he was very slow."
+
+"O, men always are with their fingers. I don't think that was
+anything," said Barbara. "But I think he seemed rather nervous when
+he came over. And he would not sit in the house, though the wind was
+coming up then. He said he liked the air; and he and father got the
+shaker chairs up there by the front door; and he sat and pinched his
+knees together to make a lap to hold his papers; it was as much as he
+could manage; no wonder his hands trembled."
+
+"I wonder what they were talking about," said Rosamond.
+
+"I'm glad Uncle Stephen went home with him," said Ruth.
+
+"I wonder if we shall have this house to live in if grandfather should
+die," said Stephen, suddenly. It could not have been his _first_
+thought; he had sat soberly silent a good while.
+
+"O Stevie! _don't_ let's think anything about that!" said Ruth; and
+nobody else answered at all.
+
+We sent Stephen off to bed, and we girls sat round the fire, which we
+had made up in the great open fireplace, till twelve o'clock; then we
+all went up stairs, leaving the side door unfastened. Ruth brought
+some pillows and comfortables into Rosamond and Barbara's room, made
+up a couch for herself on the box-sofa, and gave her little white one
+to Leslie. We kept the door open between. We could see the light in
+grandfather's northwest chamber; and the lamp was still burning in the
+porch below. We could not possibly know anything; whether Robert had
+got back, and the doctor had come,--whether he was better or
+worse,--whether father would come home to-night. We could only guess.
+
+"O Leslie, it is so good you are here!" we said.
+
+There was something eerie in the night, in the wreck and confusion of
+the storm, in our loneliness without father and mother, and in the
+possible awfulness and change that were so near,--over there in
+Grandfather Holabird's lighted room.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+HALLOWEEN.
+
+
+Breakfast was late the next morning. It had been nearly two o'clock
+when father had come home. He told us that grandfather was better;
+that it was what the doctor called a premonitory attack; that he might
+have another and more serious one any day, or that he might live on
+for years without a repetition. For the present he was to be kept as
+easy and quiet as possible, and gradually allowed to resume his old
+habits as his strength permitted.
+
+Mother came back in a few days more; Aunt Radford also was better. The
+family fell into the old ways again, and it was as if no change had
+threatened. Father told mother, however, something of importance that
+grandfather had said to him that afternoon, before he was taken ill.
+He had been on the point of showing him something which he looked for
+among his papers, just before the wind whirled them out of his hands.
+He had almost said he would complete and give it to him at once; and
+then, when they were interrupted, he had just put everything up again,
+and they had walked over home together. Then there had been the
+excitement of the gale, and grandfather had insisted upon going to the
+barns himself to see that all was made properly fast, and had come
+back all out of breath, and had been taken with that ill turn in the
+midst of the storm.
+
+The paper he was going to show to father was an unwitnessed deed of
+gift. He had thought of securing to us this home, by giving it in
+trust to father for his wife and children.
+
+"I helped John into his New York business," he said, "by investing
+money in it that he has had the use of, at moderate interest, ever
+since; and Roderick and his wife have had their home with me. None of
+my boys ever paid me any _board_. I sha'n't make a will; the law gives
+things where they belong; there's nothing but this that wants evening;
+and so I've been thinking about it. What you do with your share of my
+other property when you get it is no concern of mine as I know of; but
+I should like to give you something in such a shape that it couldn't
+go for old debts. I never undertook to shoulder any of _them_; what
+little I've done was done for you. I wrote out the paper myself; I
+never go to lawyers. I suppose it would stand clear enough for honest
+comprehension,--and Roderick and John are both honest,--if I left it
+as it is; but perhaps I'd as well take it some day to Squire Hadden,
+and swear to it, and then hand it over to you. I'll see about it."
+
+That was what grandfather had said; mother told us all about it;
+there were no secret committees in our domestic congress; all was done
+in open house; we knew all the hopes and the perplexities, only they
+came round to us in due order of hearing. But father had not really
+seen the paper, after all; and after grandfather got well, he never
+mentioned it again all that winter. The wonder was that he had
+mentioned it at all.
+
+"He forgets a good many things, since his sickness," father said,
+"unless something comes up to remind him. But there is the paper; he
+must come across that."
+
+"He may change his mind," said mother, "even when he does recollect.
+We can be sure of nothing."
+
+But we grew more fond than ever of the old, sunshiny house. In October
+Harry Goldthwaite went away again on a year's cruise.
+
+Rosamond had a letter from Mrs. Van Alstyne, from New York. She folded
+it up after she had read it, and did not tell us anything about it.
+She answered it next day; and it was a month later when one night up
+stairs she began something she had to say about our winter shopping
+with,--
+
+"If I had gone to New York--" and there she stopped, as if she had
+accidentally said what she did not intend.
+
+"If you had gone to New York! Why! When?" cried Barbara. "What do you
+mean?"
+
+"Nothing," Rosamond answered, in a vexed way. "Mrs. Van Alstyne asked
+me, that is all. Of course I couldn't."
+
+"Of course you're just a glorious old _noblesse oblige_-d! Why didn't
+you say something? You might have gone perhaps. We could all have
+helped. I'd have lent you--that garnet and white silk!"
+
+Rosamond would not say anything more, and she would scarcely be
+kissed.
+
+After all, she had co-operated more than any of us. Rose was always
+the daughter who objected and then did. I have often thought that
+young man in Scripture ought to have been a woman. It is more a
+woman's way.
+
+The maples were in their gold and vermilion now, and the round masses
+of the ash were shining brown; we filled the vases with their leaves,
+and pressed away more in all the big books we could confiscate, and
+hunted frosted ferns in the wood-edge, and had beautiful pine blazes
+morning and evening in the brown room, and began to think how
+pleasant, for many cosey things, the winter was going to be, out here
+at Westover.
+
+"How nicely we could keep Halloween," said Ruth, "round this great
+open chimney! What a row of nuts we could burn!"
+
+"So we will," said Rosamond. "We'll ask the girls. Mayn't we, mother?"
+
+"To tea?"
+
+"No. Only to the fun,--and some supper. We can have that all ready in
+the other room."
+
+"They'll see the cooking-stove."
+
+"They won't know it, when they do," said Barbara.
+
+"We might have the table in the front room," suggested Ruth.
+
+"The drawing-room!" cried Rosamond. "That _would_ be a make-shift. Who
+ever heard of having supper there? No; we'll have both rooms open,
+and a bright fire in each, and one up in mother's room for them to
+take off their things. And there'll be the piano, and the stereoscope,
+and the games, in the parlor. We'll begin in there, and out here we'll
+have the fortune tricks and the nuts later; and then the supper,
+bravely and comfortably, in the dining-room, where it belongs. If they
+get frightened at anything, they can go home; I'm going to new cover
+that screen, though, mother; And I'll tell you what with,--that piece
+of goldy-brown damask up in the cedar-trunk. And I'll put an arabesque
+of crimson braid around it for a border, and the room will be all
+goldy-brown and crimson then, and nobody will stop to think which is
+brocade and which is waterproof. They'll be sitting on the waterproof,
+you know, and have the brocade to look at. It's just old enough to
+seem as if it had always been standing round somewhere."
+
+"It will be just the kind of party for us to have," said Barbara.
+
+"They couldn't have it up there, if they tried. It would be sure to be
+Marchbanksy."
+
+Rosamond smiled contentedly. She was beginning to recognize her own
+special opportunities. She was quite conscious of her own tact in
+utilizing them.
+
+But then came the intricate questions of who? and who not?
+
+"Not everybody, of course," said Rose, "That would be a confusion.
+Just the neighbors,--right around here."
+
+"That takes in the Hobarts, and leaves out Leslie Goldthwaite," said
+Ruth, quietly.
+
+"O, Leslie will be at the Haddens', or here," replied Rosamond.
+"Grace Hobart is nice," she went on; "if only she wouldn't be 'real'
+nice!"
+
+"That is just the word for her, though," said Ruth. "The Hobarts _are_
+real."
+
+Rosamond's face gathered over. It was not easy to reconcile things.
+She liked them all, each in their way. If they would only all come,
+and like each other.
+
+"What is it, Rose?" said Barbara, teasing. "Your brows are knit,--your
+nose is crocheted,--and your mouth is--tatted! I shall have to come
+and ravel you out."
+
+"I'm thinking; that is all."
+
+"How to build the fence?"
+
+"What fence?"
+
+"That fence round the pond,--the old puzzle. There was once a pond,
+and four men came and built four little houses round it,--close to the
+water. Then four other men came and built four big houses, exactly
+behind the first ones. They wanted the pond all to themselves; but the
+little people were nearest to it; how could they build the fence, you
+know? They had to squirm it awfully! You see the plain, insignificant
+people are so apt to be nearest the good time!"
+
+"I like to satisfy everybody."
+
+"You won't,--with a squirm-fence!"
+
+If it had not been for Ruth, we should have gone on just as innocently
+as possible, and invited them--Marchbankses and all--to our Halloween
+frolic. But Ruth was such a little news-picker, with her music
+lessons! She had five scholars now; beside Lily and Reba, there were
+Elsie Hobart and little Frank Hendee, and Pen Pennington, a girl of
+her own age, who had come all the way from Fort Vancouver, over the
+Pacific Railroad, to live here with her grandmother. Between the four
+houses, Ruth heard everything.
+
+All Saints' Day fell on Monday; the Sunday made double hallowing,
+Barbara said; and Saturday was the "E'en." We did not mean to invite
+until Wednesday; on Tuesday Ruth came home and told us that Olivia and
+Adelaide Marchbanks were getting up a Halloween themselves, and that
+the Haddens were asked already; and that Lily and Reba were in
+transports because they were to be allowed to go.
+
+"Did you say anything?" asked Rosamond.
+
+"Yes. I suppose I ought not; but Elinor was in the room, and I spoke
+before I thought."
+
+"What did you tell her?"
+
+"I only said it was such a pity; that you meant to ask them all. And
+Elinor said it would be so nice here. If it were anybody else, we
+might try to arrange something."
+
+But how could we meddle with the Marchbankses? With Olivia and
+Adelaide, of all the Marchbankses? We could not take it for granted
+that they meant to ask us. There was no such thing as suggesting a
+compromise. Rosamond looked high and splendid, and said not another
+word.
+
+In the afternoon of Wednesday Adelaide and Maud Marchbanks rode by,
+homeward, on their beautiful little brown, long-tailed Morgans.
+
+"They don't mean to," said Barbara. "If they did, they would have
+stopped."
+
+"Perhaps they will send a note to-morrow," said Ruth.
+
+"Do you think I am waiting, in hopes?" asked Rosamond, in her
+clearest, quietest tones.
+
+Pretty soon she came in with her hat on. "I am going over to invite
+the Hobarts," she said.
+
+"That will settle it, whatever happens," said Barbara.
+
+"Yes," said Rosamond; and she walked out.
+
+The Hobarts were "ever so much obliged to us; and they would certainly
+come." Mrs. Hobart lent Rosamond an old English book of "Holiday
+Sports and Observances," with ten pages of Halloween charms in it.
+
+From the Hobarts' house she walked on into Z----, and asked Leslie
+Goldthwaite and Helen Josselyn, begging Mrs. Ingleside to come too, if
+she would; the doctor would call for them, of course, and should have
+his supper; but it was to be a girl-party in the early evening.
+
+Leslie was not at home; Rosamond gave the message to her mother. Then
+she met Lucilla Waters in the street.
+
+"I was just thinking of you," she said. She did not say, "coming to
+you," for truly, in her mind, she had not decided it. But seeing her
+gentle, refined face, pale always with the life that had little frolic
+in it, she spoke right out to that, without deciding.
+
+"We want you at our Halloween party on Saturday. Will you come? You
+will have Helen and the Inglesides to come with, and perhaps Leslie."
+
+Rosamond, even while delivering her message to Mrs. Goldthwaite for
+Leslie, had seen an unopened note lying upon the table, addressed to
+her in the sharp, tall hand of Olivia Marchbanks.
+
+She stopped in at the Haddens, told them how sorry she had been to
+find they were promised; asked if it were any use to go to the
+Hendees'; and when Elinor said, "But you will be sure to be asked to
+the Marchbankses yourselves," replied, "It is a pity they should come
+together, but we had quite made up our minds to have this little
+frolic, and we have begun, too, you see."
+
+Then she did go to the Hendees', although it was dark; and Maria
+Hendee, who seldom went out to parties, promised to come. "They would
+divide," she said. "Fanny might go to Olivia's. Holiday-keeping was
+different from other invites. One might take liberties."
+
+Now the Hendees were people who could take liberties, if anybody. Last
+of all, Rosamond went in and asked Pen Pennington.
+
+It was Thursday, just at dusk, when Adelaide Marchbanks walked over,
+at last, and proffered her invitation.
+
+"You had better all come to us," she said, graciously. "It is a pity
+to divide. We want the same people, of course,--the Hendees, and the
+Haddens, and Leslie." She hardly attempted to disguise that we
+ourselves were an afterthought.
+
+Rosamond told her, very sweetly, that we were obliged, but that she
+was afraid it was quite too late; we had asked others; the Hobarts,
+and the Inglesides; one or two whom Adelaide did not know,--Helen
+Josselyn, and Lucilla Waters; the parties would not interfere much,
+after all.
+
+Rosamond took up, as it were, a little sceptre of her own, from that
+moment.
+
+Leslie Goldthwaite had been away for three days, staying with her
+friend, Mrs. Frank Scherman, in Boston. She had found Olivia's note,
+of Monday evening, when she returned; also, she heard of Rosamond's
+verbal invitation. Leslie was very bright about these things. She saw
+in a moment how it had been. Her mother told her what Rosamond had
+said of who were coming,--the Hobarts and Helen; the rest were not
+then asked.
+
+Olivia did not like it very well,--that reply of Leslie's. She showed
+it to Jeannie Hadden; that was how we came to know of it.
+
+"Please forgive me," the note ran, "if I accept Rosamond's invitation
+for the very reason that might seem to oblige me to decline it. I see
+you have two days' advantage of her, and she will no doubt lose some
+of the girls by that. I really _heard_ hers first. I wish very much it
+were possible to have both pleasures."
+
+That was being terribly true and independent with West Z----. "But
+Leslie Goldthwaite," Barbara said, "always was as brave as a little
+bumble-bee!"
+
+How it had come over Rosamond, though, we could not quite understand.
+It was not pique, or rivalry; there was no excitement about it; it
+seemed to be a pure, spirited dignity of her own, which she all at
+once, quietly and of course, asserted.
+
+Mother said something about it to her Saturday morning, when she was
+beating up Italian cream, and Rosamond was cutting chicken for the
+salad. The cakes and the jellies had been made the day before.
+
+"You have done this, Rosamond, in a very right and neighborly way, but
+it isn't exactly your old way. How came you not to mind?"
+
+Rosamond did not discuss the matter; she only smiled and said, "I
+think, mother, I'm growing very proud and self-sufficient, since we've
+had real, _through-and-through_ ways of our own."
+
+It was the difference between "somewhere" and "betwixt and between."
+
+Miss Elizabeth Pennington came in while we were putting candles in the
+bronze branches, and Ruth was laying an artistic fire in the wide
+chimney. Ruth could make a picture with her crossed and balanced
+sticks, sloping the firm-built pile backward to the two great, solid
+logs behind,--a picture which it only needed the touch of flame to
+finish and perfect. Then the dazzling fire-wreaths curled and clasped
+through and about it all, filling the spaces with a rushing splendor,
+and reaching up their vivid spires above its compact body to an
+outline of complete live beauty. Ruth's fires satisfied you to look
+at: and they never tumbled down.
+
+She rose up with a little brown, crooked stick in one hand, to speak
+to Miss Pennington.
+
+"Don't mind me," said the lady. "Go on, please, 'biggin' your castle.'
+That will be a pretty sight to see, when it lights up."
+
+Ruth liked crooked sticks; they held fast by each other, and they made
+pretty curves and openings. So she went on, laying them deftly.
+
+"I should like to be here to-night," said Miss Elizabeth, still
+looking at the fire-pile. "Would you let an old maid in?"
+
+"Miss Pennington! Would you come?"
+
+"I took it in my head to want to. That was why I came over. Are you
+going to play snap-dragon? I wondered if you had thought of that."
+
+"We don't know about it," said Ruth. "Anything, that is, except the
+name."
+
+"That is just what I thought possible. Nobody knows those old games
+nowadays. May I come and bring a great dragon-bowl with me, and
+superintend that part? Mother got her fate out of a snap-dragon, and
+we have the identical bowl. We always used to bring it out at
+Christmas, when we were all at home."
+
+"O Miss Pennington! How perfectly lovely! How good you are!"
+
+"Well, I'm glad you take it so. I was afraid it was terribly
+meddlesome. But the fancy--or the memory--seized me."
+
+How wonderfully our Halloween party was turning out!
+
+And the turning-out is almost the best part of anything; the time when
+things are getting together, in the beautiful prosperous way they will
+take, now and then, even in this vexed world.
+
+There was our lovely little supper-table all ready. People who have
+servants enough, high-trained, to do these things while they are
+entertaining in the drawing-room, don't have half the pleasure, after
+all, that we do, in setting out hours beforehand, and putting the last
+touches and taking the final satisfaction before we go to dress.
+
+The cake, with the ring in it, was in the middle; for we had put
+together all the fateful and pretty customs we could think of, from
+whatever holiday; there were mother's Italian creams, and amber and
+garnet wine jellies; there were sponge and lady-cake, and the little
+macaroons and cocoas that Barbara had the secret of; and the salad, of
+spring chickens and our own splendid celery, was ready in the cold
+room, with its bowl of delicious dressing to be poured over it at the
+last; and the scalloped oysters were in the pantry; Ruth was to put
+them into the oven again when the time came, and mother would pin the
+white napkins around the dishes, and set them on; and nobody was to
+worry or get tired with having the whole to think of; and yet the
+whole would be done, to the very lighting of the candles, which
+Stephen had spoken for, by this beautiful, organized co-operation of
+ours. Truly it is a charming thing,--all to itself, in a family!
+
+To be sure, we had coffee and bread and butter and cold ham for dinner
+that day; and we took our tea "standed round," as Barbara said; and
+the dishes were put away in the covered sink; we knew where we could
+shirk righteously and in good order, when we could not accomplish
+everything; but there was neither huddle nor hurry; we were as quiet
+and comfortable as we could be. Even Rosamond was satisfied with the
+very manner; to be composed is always to be elegant. Anybody might
+have come in and lunched with us; anybody might have shared that easy,
+chatty cup of tea.
+
+The front parlor did not amount to much, after all, pleasant and
+pretty as it was for the first receiving; we were all too eager for
+the real business of the evening. It was bright and warm with the
+wood-fire and the lights; and the white curtains, nearly filling up
+three of its walls, made it very festal-looking. There was the open
+piano, and Ruth played a little; there was the stereoscope, and some
+of the girls looked over the new views of Catskill and the Hudson that
+Dakie Thayne had given us; there was the table with cards, and we
+played one game of Old Maid, in which the Old Maid got lost
+mysteriously into the drawer, and everybody was married; and then Miss
+Pennington appeared at the door, with her man-servant behind her, and
+there was an end. She took the big bowl, pinned over with a great
+damask napkin, out of the man's hands, and went off privately with
+Barbara into the dining-room.
+
+"This is the Snap," she said, unfastening the cover, and producing
+from within a paper parcel. "And that," holding up a little white
+bottle, "is the Dragon." And Barbara set all away in the dresser until
+after supper. Then we got together, without further ceremony, in the
+brown room.
+
+We hung wedding-rings--we had mother's, and Miss Elizabeth had brought
+over Madam Pennington's--by hairs, and held them inside tumblers; and
+they vibrated with our quickening pulses, and swung and swung, until
+they rung out fairy chimes of destiny against the sides. We floated
+needles in a great basin of water, and gave them names, and watched
+them turn and swim and draw together,--some point to point, some heads
+and points, some joined cosily side to side, while some drifted to the
+margin and clung there all alone, and some got tears in their eyes, or
+an interfering jostle, and went down. We melted lead and poured it
+into water; and it took strange shapes; of spears and masts and stars;
+and some all went to money; and one was a queer little bottle and
+pills, and one was pencils and artists' tubes, and--really--a little
+palette with a hole in it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+And then came the chestnut-roasting, before the bright red coals. Each
+girl put down a pair; and I dare say most of them put down some little
+secret, girlish thought with it. The ripest nuts burned steadiest and
+surest, of course; but how could we tell these until we tried? Some
+little crack, or unseen worm-hole, would keep one still, while its
+companion would pop off, away from it; some would take flight
+together, and land in like manner, without ever parting company; these
+were to go some long way off; some never moved from where they began,
+but burned up, stupidly and peaceably, side by side. Some snapped
+into the fire. Some went off into corners. Some glowed beautiful, and
+some burned black, and some got covered up with ashes.
+
+Barbara's pair were ominously still for a time, when all at once the
+larger gave a sort of unwilling lurch, without popping, and rolled off
+a little way, right in toward the blaze.
+
+"Gone to a warmer climate," whispered Leslie, like a tease. And then
+crack! the warmer climate, or something else, sent him back again,
+with a real bound, just as Barbara's gave a gentle little snap, and
+they both dropped quietly down against the fender together.
+
+"What made that jump back, I wonder?" said Pen Pennington.
+
+"O, it wasn't more than half cracked when it went away," said Stephen,
+looking on.
+
+Who would be bold enough to try the looking-glass? To go out alone
+with it into the dark field, walking backward, saying the rhyme to the
+stars which if there had been a moon ought by right to have been said
+to her:--
+
+        "Round and round, O stars so fair!
+         Ye travel, and search out everywhere.
+         I pray you, sweet stars, now show to me,
+         This night, who my future husband shall be!"
+
+Somehow, we put it upon Leslie. She was the oldest; we made that the
+reason.
+
+"I wouldn't do it for anything!" said Sarah Hobart. "I heard of a girl
+who tried it once, and saw a shroud!"
+
+But Leslie was full of fun that evening, and ready to do anything. She
+took the little mirror that Ruth brought her from up stairs, put on a
+shawl, and we all went to the front door with her, to see her off.
+
+"Round the piazza, and down the bank," said Barbara, "and backward
+all the way."
+
+So Leslie backed out at the door, and we shut it upon her. The instant
+after, we heard a great laugh. Off the piazza, she had stepped
+backward, directly against two gentlemen coming in.
+
+Doctor Ingleside was one, coming to get his supper; the other was a
+friend of his, just arrived in Z----. "Doctor John Hautayne," he said,
+introducing him by his full name.
+
+We knew why. He was proud of it. Doctor John Hautayne was the army
+surgeon who had been with him in the Wilderness, and had ridden a
+stray horse across a battle-field, in his shirt-sleeves, right in
+front of a Rebel battery, to get to some wounded on the other side.
+And the Rebel gunners, holding their halyards, stood still and
+shouted.
+
+It put an end to the tricks, except the snap-dragon.
+
+We had not thought how late it was; but mother and Ruth had remembered
+the oysters.
+
+Doctor John Hautayne took Leslie out to supper. We saw him look at her
+with a funny, twinkling curiosity, as he stood there with her in the
+full light; and we all thought we had never seen Leslie look prettier
+in all her life.
+
+After supper, Miss Pennington lighted up her Dragon, and threw in her
+snaps. A very little brandy, and a bowl full of blaze.
+
+Maria Hendee "snapped" first, and got a preserved date.
+
+"Ancient and honorable," said Miss Pennington, laughing.
+
+Then Pen Pennington tried, and got nothing.
+
+"You thought of your own fingers," said her aunt.
+
+"A fig for my fortune!" cried Barbara, holding up her trophy.
+
+"It came from the Mediterranean," said Mrs. Ingleside, over her
+shoulder into her ear; and the ear burned.
+
+Ruth got a sugared almond.
+
+"Only a _kernel_," said the merry doctor's wife, again.
+
+The doctor himself tried, and seized a slip of candied flag.
+
+"Warm-hearted and useful, that is all," said Mrs. Ingleside.
+
+"And tolerably pungent," said the doctor.
+
+Doctor Hautayne drew forth--angelica.
+
+Most of them were too timid or irresolute to grasp anything.
+
+"That's the analogy," said Miss Pennington. "One must take the risk of
+getting scorched. It is 'the woman who dares,' after all."
+
+It was great fun, though.
+
+Mother cut the cake. That was the last sport of the evening.
+
+If I should tell you who got the ring, you would think it really meant
+something. And the year is not out yet, you see.
+
+But there was no doubt of one thing,--that our Halloween at Westover
+was a famous little party.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"How do you all feel about it?" asked Barbara, sitting down on the
+hearth in the brown room, before the embers, and throwing the nuts she
+had picked up about the carpet into the coals.
+
+We had carried the supper-dishes away into the out-room, and set them
+on a great spare table that we kept there. "The room is as good as the
+girl," said Barbara. It _is_ a comfort to put by things, with a clear
+conscience, to a more rested time. We should let them be over the
+Sunday; Monday morning would be all china and soapsuds; then there
+would be a nice, freshly arrayed dresser, from top to bottom, and we
+should have had both a party and a piece of fall cleaning.
+
+"How do you feel about it?"
+
+"I feel as if we had had a real _own_ party, ourselves," said Ruth;
+"not as if 'the girls' had come and had a party here. There wasn't
+anybody to _show us how_!"
+
+"Except Miss Pennington. And wasn't it bewitchinating of her to come?
+Nobody can say now--"
+
+"What do you say it for, then?" interrupted Rosamond. "It was very
+nice of Miss Pennington, and kind, considering it was a young party.
+Otherwise, why shouldn't she?"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+WINTER NIGHTS AND WINTER DAYS.
+
+
+"That was a nice party," said Miss Pennington, walking home with
+Leslie and Doctor John Hautayne, behind the Inglesides. "What made it
+so nice?"
+
+"You, very much," said Leslie, straightforwardly.
+
+"I didn't begin it," said Miss Elizabeth. "No; that wasn't it. It was
+a step out, somehow Out of the treadmill. I got tired of parties long
+ago, before I was old. They were all alike. The only difference was
+that in one house the staircase went up on the right side of the hall,
+and in another on the left,--now and then, perhaps, at the back; and
+when you came down again, the lady near the drawing-room door might be
+Mrs. Hendee one night and Mrs. Marchbanks another; but after that it
+was all the same. And O, how I did get to hate ice-cream!"
+
+"This was a party of 'nexts,'" said Leslie, "instead of a selfsame."
+
+"What a good time Miss Waters had--quietly! You could see it in her
+face. A pretty face!" Miss Elizabeth spoke in a lower tone, for
+Lucilla was just before the Inglesides, with Helen and Pen Pennington.
+"She works too hard, though. I wish she came out more."
+
+"The 'nexts' have to get tired of books and mending-baskets, while the
+firsts are getting tired of ice-creams," replied Leslie. "Dear Miss
+Pennington, there are ever so many nexts, and people don't think
+anything about it!"
+
+"So there are," said Miss Elizabeth, quietly. "People are very stupid.
+They don't know what will freshen themselves up. They think the
+trouble is with the confectionery, and so they try macaroon and
+pistachio instead of lemon and vanilla. Fresh people are better than
+fresh flavors. But I think we had everything fresh to-night. What a
+beautiful old home-y house it is!"
+
+"And what a home-y family!" said Doctor John Hautayne.
+
+"_We_ have an old home-y house," said Miss Pennington, suddenly, "with
+landscape-papered walls and cosey, deep windows and big chimneys. And
+we don't half use it. Doctor Hautayne, I mean to have a party! Will
+you stay and come to it?"
+
+"Any time within my two months' leave," replied Doctor Hautayne, "and
+with very great pleasure."
+
+"So she will have it before very long," said Leslie, telling us about
+the talk the next day.
+
+It! Well, when Miss Pennington took up a thing she _did_ take it up!
+That does not come in here, though,--any more of it.
+
+The Penningtons are very proud people. They have not a very great deal
+of money, like the Haddens, and they are not foremost in everything
+like the Marchbankses; somehow they do not seem to care to take the
+trouble for that; but they are so _established_; it is a family like
+an old tree, that is past its green branching time, and makes little
+spread or summer show, but whose roots reach out away underneath, and
+grasp more ground than all the rest put together.
+
+They live in an old house that is just like them. It has not a
+new-fashioned thing about it. The walls are square, plain brick,
+painted gray; and there is a low, broad porch in front, and then
+terraces, flagged with gray stone and bordered with flower-beds at
+each side and below. They have peacocks and guinea-hens, and more
+roses and lilies and larkspurs and foxgloves and narcissus than
+flowers of any newer sort; and there are great bushes of box and
+southernwood, that smell sweet as you go by.
+
+Old General Pennington had been in the army all his life. He was a
+captain at Lundy's Lane, and got a wound there which gave him a stiff
+elbow ever after; and his oldest son was killed in Mexico, just after
+he had been brevetted Major. There is a Major Pennington now,--the
+younger brother,--out at Fort Vancouver; and he is Pen's father. When
+her mother died, away out there, he had to send her home. The
+Penningtons are just as proud as the stars and stripes themselves; and
+their glory is off the selfsame piece.
+
+They made very much of Dakie Thayne when he was here, in their quiet,
+retired way; and they had always been polite and cordial to the
+Inglesides.
+
+One morning, a little while after our party, mother was making an
+apple-pudding for dinner, when Madam Pennington and Miss Elizabeth
+drove round to the door.
+
+Ruth was out at her lessons; Barbara was busy helping Mrs. Holabird.
+Rosamond went to the door, and let them into the brown room.
+
+"Mother will be sorry to keep you waiting, but she will come directly.
+She is just in the middle of an apple-pudding."
+
+Rosamond said it with as much simple grace of pride as if she had had
+to say, "Mother is busy at her modelling, and cannot leave her clay
+till she has damped and covered it." Her nice perception went to the
+very farther-most; it discerned the real best to be made of things,
+the best that was _ready_ made, and put that forth.
+
+"And I know," said Madam Pennington, "that an apple-pudding must not
+be left in the middle. I wonder if she would let an old woman who has
+lived in barracks come to her where she is?"
+
+Rosamond's tact was superlative. She did not say, "I will go and see";
+she got right up and said, "I am sure she will; please come this way,"
+and opened the door, with a sublime confidence, full and without
+warning, upon the scene of operations.
+
+"O, how nice!" said Miss Elizabeth; and Madam Pennington walked
+forward into the sunshine, holding her hand out to Mrs. Holabird, and
+smiling all the way from her smooth old forehead down to the "seventh
+beauty" of her dimple-cleft and placid chin.
+
+"Why, this is really coming to see people!" she said.
+
+Mrs. Holabird's white hand did not even want dusting; she just laid
+down the bright little chopper with which she was reducing her flour
+and butter to a golden powder, and took Madam Pennington's nicely
+gloved fingers into her own, without a breath of apology. Apology! It
+was very meek of her not to look at all set up.
+
+Barbara rose from her chair with a red ringlet of apple-paring hanging
+down against her white apron, and seated herself again at her work
+when the visitors had taken the two opposite corners of the deep,
+cushioned sofa.
+
+The red cloth was folded back across the end of the dining-table, and
+at the other end were mother's white board and rolling-pin, the
+pudding-cloth wrung into a twist out of the scald, and waiting upon a
+plate, and a pitcher of cold water with ice tinkling against its
+sides. Mother sat with the deal bowl in her lap, turning and mincing
+with the few last strokes the light, delicate dust of the pastry. The
+sunshine--work and sunshine always go so blessedly together--poured
+in, and filled the room up with life and glory.
+
+"Why, this is the pleasantest room in all your house!" said Miss
+Elizabeth.
+
+"That is just what Ruth said it would be when we turned it into a
+kitchen," said Barbara.
+
+"You don't mean that this is really your kitchen!"
+
+"I don't think we are quite sure what it is," replied Barbara,
+laughing. "We either dine in our kitchen or kitch in our dining-room;
+and I don't believe we have found out yet which it is!"
+
+"You are wonderful people!"
+
+"You ought to have belonged to the army, and lived in quarters," said
+Mrs. Pennington. "Only you would have made your rooms so bewitching
+you would have been always getting turned out."
+
+"Turned out?"
+
+"Yes; by the ranking family. That is the way they do. The major turns
+out the captain, and the colonel the major. There's no rest for the
+sole of your foot till you're a general."
+
+Mrs. Holabird set her bowl on the table, and poured in the ice-water.
+Then the golden dust, turned and cut lightly by the chopper, gathered
+into a tender, mellow mass, and she lifted it out upon the board.
+She shook out the scalded cloth, spread it upon the emptied bowl,
+sprinkled it snowy-thick with flour, rolled out the crust with a free
+quick movement, and laid it on, into the curve of the basin. Barbara
+brought the apples, cut up in white fresh slices, and slid them into
+the round. Mrs. Holabird folded over the edges, gathered up the linen
+cloth in her hands, tied it tightly with a string, and Barbara
+disappeared with it behind the damask screen, where a puff of steam
+went up in a minute that told the pudding was in. Then Mrs. Holabird
+went into the pantry-closet and washed her hands, that never really
+came to need more than a finger-bowl could do for them, and Barbara
+carried after her the board and its etceteras, and the red cloth was
+drawn on again, and there was nothing, but a low, comfortable bubble
+in the chimney-corner to tell of house-wifery or dinner.
+
+"I wish it had lasted longer," said Miss Elizabeth. "I am afraid I
+shall feel like company again now."
+
+"I am ashamed to tell you what I came for," said Madam Pennington.
+"It was to ask about a girl. Can I do anything with Winny Lafferty?"
+
+"I wish you could," said Mrs. Holabird, benevolently.
+
+"She needs doing with" said Barbara.
+
+"Your having her would be different from our doing so," said Mrs.
+Holabird. "I often think that one of the tangles in the girl-question
+is the mistake of taking the rawest specimens into families that keep
+but one. With your Lucy, it might be the very making of Winny to go to
+you."
+
+"The 'next' for her, as Ruth would say," said Barbara.
+
+"Yes. The least little thing that comes next is better than a world
+full of wisdom away off beyond. There is too much in 'general
+housework' for one ignorant, inexperienced brain to take in. What
+should we think of a government that gave out its 'general field-work'
+so?"
+
+"There won't be any Lucys long," said Madam Pennington, with a sigh.
+"What are homes coming to?"
+
+"Back to _homes_, I hope, from _houses_ divided against themselves
+into parlors and kitchens," said mother, earnestly. "If I should tell
+you all I think about it, you would say it was visionary, I am afraid.
+But I believe we have got to go back to first principles; and then the
+Lucys will grow again."
+
+"Modern establishments are not homes truly," said Madam Pennington.
+
+"We shall call them by their names, as the French do, if we go on,"
+said mother,--"hotels."
+
+"And how are we to stop, or help it? The enemy has got possession.
+Irishocracy is a despotism in the land."
+
+"Only," said mother, in her sweetest, most heartfelt way, "by
+learning how true it is that one must be chief to really serve; that
+it takes the highest to do perfect ministering; that the brightest
+grace and the most beautiful culture must come to bear upon this
+little, every-day living, which is all that the world works for after
+all. The whole heaven is made that just the daily bread for human
+souls may come down out of it. Only the Lord God can pour this room
+full of little waves of sunshine, and make a still, sweet morning in
+the earth."
+
+Mother and Madam Pennington looked at each other with soulful eyes.
+
+"'We girls,'" began mother again, smiling,--"for that is the way the
+children count me in,--said to each other, when we first tried this
+new plan, that we would make an art-kitchen. We meant we would have
+things nice and pretty for our common work; but there is something
+behind that,--the something that 'makes the meanest task divine,'--the
+spiritual correspondence of it. When we are educated up to that I
+think life and society will be somewhat different. I think we shall
+not always stop short at the drawing-room, and pretend at each other
+on the surface of things. I think the time may come when young girls
+and single women will be as willing, and think it as honorable, to go
+into homes which they need, and which need them, and give the best
+that they have grown to into the commonwealth of them, as they are
+willing now to educate and try for public places. And it will seem to
+them as great and beautiful a thing to do. They won't be buried,
+either. When they take the work up, and glorify it, it will glorify
+them. We don't know yet what households might be, if now we have got
+the wheels so perfected, we would put the living spirit into the
+wheels. They are the motive power; homes are the primary meetings.
+They would be little kingdoms, of great might! I _wish_ women would be
+content with their mainspring work, and not want to go out and point
+the time upon the dial!"
+
+Mother never would have made so long a speech, but that beautiful old
+Mrs. Pennington was answering her back all the time out of her eyes.
+There was such a magnetism between them for the moment, that she
+scarcely knew she was saying it all. The color came up in their
+cheeks, and they were young and splendid, both of them. We thought it
+was as good a Woman's Convention as if there had been two thousand of
+them instead of two. And when some of the things out of the closets
+get up on the house-tops, maybe it will prove so.
+
+Madam Pennington leaned over and kissed mother when she took her hand
+at going away. And then Miss Elizabeth spoke out suddenly,--
+
+"I have not done my errand yet, Mrs. Holabird. Mother has taken up all
+the time. I want to have some _nexts_. Your girls know what I mean;
+and I want them to take hold and help. They are going to be 'next
+Thursdays,' and to begin this very coming Thursday of all. I shall
+give primary invitations only,--and my primaries are to find
+secondaries. No household is to represent merely itself; one or two,
+or more, from one family are to bring always one or two, or more, from
+somewhere else. I am going to try if one little bit of social life
+cannot be exogenous; and if it can, what the branching-out will come
+to. I think we want sapwood as well as heartwood to keep us green. If
+anybody doesn't quite understand, refer to 'How Plants Grow--Gray.'"
+
+She went off, leaving us that to think of.
+
+Two days after she looked in again, and said more. "Besides that,
+every primary or season invitation imposes a condition. Each member is
+to provide one practical answer to 'What next?' 'Next Thursday' is
+always to be in charge of somebody. You may do what you like, or can,
+with it. I'll manage the first myself. After that I wash my hands."
+
+Out of it grew fourteen incomparable Thursday evenings. Pretty much
+all we can do about them is to tell that they were; we should want
+fourteen new numbers to write their full history. It was like Mr.
+Hale's lovely "Ten Times One is Ten." They all came from that one
+blessed little Halloween party of ours. It means something that there
+_is_ such a thing as the multiplication-table; doesn't it? You can't
+help yourself if you start a unit, good or bad. The Garden of Eden,
+and the Ark, and the Loaves and Fishes, and the Hundred and Forty-four
+Thousand sealed in their foreheads, tell of it, all through the Bible,
+from first to last. "Multiply!" was the very next, inevitable
+commandment, after the "Let there be!"
+
+It was such a thing as had never rolled up, or branched out, though,
+in Westover before. The Marchbankses did not know what to make of it.
+People got in who had never belonged. There they were, though, in the
+stately old Pennington house, that was never thrown open for nothing;
+and when they were once there you really could not tell the
+difference; unless, indeed, it were that the old, middle wood was the
+deadest, just as it is in the trees; and that the life was in the new
+sap and the green rind.
+
+Lucilla Waters invented charades; and Helen Josselyn acted them, as
+charades had never been acted on West Hill until now. When it came to
+the Hobarts' "Next Thursday" they gave us "Dissolving Views,"--every
+successive queer fashion that had come up resplendent and gone down
+grotesque in these last thirty years. Mrs. Hobart had no end of old
+relics,--bandbaskets packed full of venerable bonnets, that in their
+close gradation of change seemed like one individual Indur passing
+through a metempsychosis of millinery; nests of old hats that were
+odder than the bonnets; swallow-tailed coats; broad-skirted blue ones
+with brass buttons; baby waists and basquines; leg-of-mutton sleeves,
+balloons, and military; collars inch-wide and collars ell-wide with
+ruffles _rayonnantes_; gathers and gores, tunnel-skirts, and
+barrel-skirts and paniers. She made monstrous paper dickeys,
+and high black stocks, and great bundling neckcloths; the very
+pocket-handkerchiefs were as ridiculous as anything, from the
+waiter-napkin size of good stout cambric to a quarter-dollar bit of a
+middle with a cataract of "chandelier" lace about it. She could tell
+everybody how to do their hair, from "flat curls" and "scallops" down
+or up to frizzes and chignons; and after we had all filed in slowly,
+one by one, and filled up the room, I don't think there ever could
+have been a funnier evening!
+
+We had musical nights, and readings. We had a "Mutual Friend"
+Thursday; that was Mrs. Ingleside's. Rosamond was the Boofer Lady;
+Barbara was Lavvy the Irrepressible; and Miss Pennington herself was
+Mrs. Wilfer; Mr. and Mrs. Hobart were the Boffins; and Doctor
+Ingleside, with a wooden leg strapped on, dropped into poetry in the
+light of a friend; Maria Hendee came in twisting up her back hair, as
+Pleasant Riderhood,--Maria Hendee's back hair was splendid; Leslie
+looked very sweet and quiet as Lizzie Hexam, and she brought with her
+for her secondary that night the very, real little doll's dressmaker
+herself,--Maddy Freeman, who has carved brackets, and painted lovely
+book-racks and easels and vases and portfolios for almost everybody's
+parlors, and yet never gets into them herself.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Leslie would not have asked her to be Jennie Wren, because she really
+has a lame foot; but when they told her about it, she said right off,
+"O, how I wish I could be that!" She has not only the lame foot, but
+the wonderful "golden bower" of sunshiny hair too; and she knows the
+doll's dressmaker by heart; she says she expects to find her some
+time, if ever she goes to England--or to heaven. Truly she was up to
+the "tricks and the manners" of the occasion; nobody entered into it
+with more self-abandonment than she; she was so completely Jennie Wren
+that no one--at the moment--thought of her in any other character, or
+remembered their rules of behaving according to the square of the
+distance. She "took patterns" of Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks's trimmings to
+her very face; she readied up behind Mrs. Linceford, and measured the
+festoon of her panier. There was no reason why she should be afraid or
+abashed; Maddy Freeman is a little lady, only she is poor, and a
+genius. She stepped right _out_ of Dickens's story, not _into_ it, as
+the rest of us did; neither did she even seem to step consciously into
+the grand Pennington house; all she did as to that was to go "up
+here," or "over there," and "be dead," as fresh, new-world delights
+attracted her. Lizzie Hexam went too; they belonged together; and
+T'other Governor would insist on following after them, and being
+comfortably dead also, though Society was behind him, and the
+Veneerings and the Podsnaps looking on. Mrs. Ingleside did not provide
+any Podsnaps or Veneerings; she said they would be there.
+
+Now Eugene Wrayburn was Doctor John Hautayne; for this was only our
+fourth evening. Nobody had anything to say about parts, except the
+person whose "next" it was; people had simply to take what they were
+helped to.
+
+We began to be a little suspicious of Doctor Hautayne; to wonder about
+his "what next." Leslie behaved as if she had always known him; I
+believe it seemed to her as if she always had; some lives meet in a
+way like that.
+
+It did not end with parties, Miss Pennington's exogenous experiment.
+She did not mean it should. A great deal that was glad and comfortable
+came of it to many persons. Miss Elizabeth asked Maddy Freeman to
+"come up and be dead" whenever she felt like it; she goes there every
+week now, to copy pictures, and get rare little bits for her designs
+out of the Penningtons' great portfolios of engravings and drawings of
+ancient ornamentations; and half the time they keep her to luncheon or
+to tea. Lucilla Waters knows them now as well as we do; and she is
+taking German lessons with Pen Pennington.
+
+It really seems as if the "nexts" would grow on so that at last it
+would only be our old "set" that would be in any danger of getting
+left out. "Society is like a coral island after all," says Leslie
+Goldthwaite. "It isn't a rock of the Old Silurian."
+
+It was a memorable winter to us in many ways,--that last winter of the
+nineteenth century's seventh decade.
+
+One day--everything has to be one day, and all in a minute, when it
+does come, however many days lead up to it--Doctor Ingleside came in
+and told us the news. He had been up to see Grandfather Holabird;
+grandfather was not quite well.
+
+They told him at home, the doctor said, not to stop anywhere; he knew
+what they meant by that, but he didn't care; it was as much his news
+as anybody's, and why should he be kept down to pills and plasters?
+
+Leslie was going to marry Doctor John Hautayne.
+
+Well! It was splendid news, and we had somehow expected it. And
+yet--"only think!" That was all we could say; that is a true thing
+people do say to each other, in the face of a great, beautiful fact.
+Take it in; shut your door upon it; and--think! It is something that
+belongs to heart and soul.
+
+We counted up; it was only seven weeks.
+
+"As if that were the whole of it!" said Doctor Ingleside. "As if the
+Lord didn't know! As if they hadn't been living on, to just this
+meeting-place! She knows his life, and the sort of it, though she has
+never been in it with him before; that is, we'll concede that, for the
+sake of argument, though I'm not so sure about it; and he has come
+right here into hers. They are fair, open, pleasant ways, both of
+them; and here, from the joining, they can both look back and take in,
+each the other's; and beyond they just run into one, you see, as
+foreordained, and there's no other way for them to go."
+
+Nobody knew it but ourselves that next night,--Thursday. Doctor
+Hautayne read beautiful things from the Brownings at Miss Pennington's
+that evening; it was his turn to provide; but for us,--we looked into
+new depths in Leslie's serene, clear, woman eyes, and we felt the
+intenser something in his face and voice, and the wonder was that
+everybody could not see how quite another thing than any merely
+written poetry was really "next" that night for Leslie and for John
+Hautayne.
+
+That was in December; it was the first of March when Grandfather
+Holabird died.
+
+At about Christmas-time mother had taken a bad cold. We could not let
+her get up in the mornings to help before breakfast; the winter work
+was growing hard; there were two or three fires to manage besides the
+furnace, which father attended to; and although our "chore-man" came
+and split up kindlings and filled the wood-boxes, yet we were all
+pretty well tired out, sometimes, just with keeping warm. We began to
+begin to say things to each other which nobody actually finished. "If
+mother doesn't get better," and "If this cold weather keeps on," and
+"_Are_ we going to co-operate ourselves to death, do you think?" from
+Barbara, at last.
+
+Nobody said, "We shall have to get a girl again." Nobody wanted to do
+that; and everybody had a secret feeling of Aunt Roderick, and her
+prophecy that we "shouldn't hold out long." But we were crippled and
+reduced; Ruth had as much as ever she could do, with the short days
+and her music.
+
+"I begin to believe it was easy enough for Grant to say 'all
+_summer_,'" said Barbara; "but _this_ is Valley Forge." The kitchen
+fire wouldn't burn, and the thermometer was down to 3° above. Mother
+was worrying up stairs, we knew, because we would not let her come
+down until it was warm and her coffee was ready.
+
+That very afternoon Stephen came in from school with a word for the
+hour.
+
+"The Stilkings are going to move right off to New Jersey," said he.
+"Jim Stilking told me so. The doctor says his father can't stay here."
+
+"Arctura Fish won't go," said Rosamond, instantly.
+
+"Arctura Fish is as neat as a pin, and as smart as a steel trap," said
+Barbara, regardless of elegance; "and--since nobody else will ever
+dare to give in--I believe Arctura Fish is the very next thing, now,
+for us!"
+
+"It isn't giving in; it is going on," said Mrs. Holabird.
+
+It certainly was not going back.
+
+"We have got through ploughing-time, and now comes seed-time, and then
+harvest," said Barbara. "We shall raise, upon a bit of renovated
+earth, the first millennial specimen,--see if we don't!--of what was
+supposed to be an extinct flora,--the _Domestica antediluviana_."
+
+Arctura Fish came to us.
+
+If you once get a new dress, or a new dictionary, or a new convenience
+of any kind, did you never notice that you immediately have occasions
+which prove that you couldn't have lived another minute without it? We
+could not have spared Arctura a single day, after that, all winter.
+Mother gave up, and was ill for a fortnight. Stephen twisted his foot
+skating, and was laid up with a sprained ankle.
+
+And then, in February, grandfather was taken with that last fatal
+attack, and some of us had to be with Aunt Roderick nearly all the
+time during the three weeks that he lived.
+
+When they came to look through the papers there was no will found, of
+any kind; neither was that deed of gift.
+
+Aunt Trixie was the only one out of the family who knew anything about
+it. She had been the "family bosom," Barbara said, ever since she
+cuddled us up in our baby blankets, and told us "this little pig, and
+that little pig," while she warmed our toes.
+
+"Don't tell me!" said Aunt Trixie. Aunt Trixie never liked the
+Roderick Holabirds.
+
+We tried not to think about it, but it was not comfortable. It was,
+indeed, a very serious anxiety and trouble that began, in consequence,
+to force itself upon us.
+
+After the bright, gay nights had come weary, vexing days. And the
+worst was a vague shadow of family distrust and annoyance. Nobody
+thought any real harm, nobody disbelieved or suspected; but there it
+was. We could not think how such a declared determination and act of
+Grandfather Holabird should have come to nothing. Uncle and Aunt
+Roderick "could not see what we could expect about it; there was
+nothing to show; and there were John and John's children; it was not
+for any one or two to settle."
+
+Only Ruth said "we were all good people, and meant right; it must all
+come right, somehow."
+
+But father made up his mind that we could not afford to keep the
+place. He should pay his debts, now, the first thing. What was left
+must do for us; the house must go into the estate.
+
+It was fixed, though, that we should stay there for the summer,--until
+affairs were settled.
+
+"It's a dumb shame!" said Aunt Trixie.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+RUTH'S RESPONSIBILITY.
+
+
+The June days did not make it any better. And the June nights,--well,
+we had to sit in the "front box at the sunset," and think how there
+would be June after June here for somebody, and we should only have
+had just two of them out of our whole lives.
+
+Why did not grandfather give us that paper, when he began to? And what
+could have become of it since? And what if it were found some time,
+after the dear old place was sold and gone? For it was the "dear old
+place" already to us, though we had only lived there a year, and
+though Aunt Roderick did say, in her cold fashion, just as if we could
+choose about it, that "it was not as if it were really an old
+homestead; it wouldn't be so much of a change for us, if we made up
+our minds not to take it in, as if we had always lived there."
+
+Why, we _had_ always lived there! That was just the way we had always
+been trying to spell "home," though we had never got the right letters
+to do it with before. When exactly the right thing comes to you, it is
+a thing that has always been. You don't get the very sticks and stones
+to begin with, maybe; but what they stand for grows up in you, and
+when you come to it you know it is yours. The best things--the most
+glorious and wonderful of all--will be what we shall see to have been
+"laid up for us from the foundation." Aunt Roderick did not see one
+bit of how that was with us.
+
+"There isn't a word in the tenth commandment about not coveting your
+_own_ house," Barbara would say, boldly. And we did covet, and we did
+grieve. And although we did not mean to have "hard thoughts," we felt
+that Aunt Roderick was hard; and that Uncle Roderick and Uncle John
+were hatefully matter-of-fact and of-course about the "business."
+And that paper might be somewhere, yet. We did not believe that
+Grandfather Holabird had "changed his mind and burned it up." He had
+not had much mind to change, within those last six months. When he
+_was_ well, and had a mind, we knew what he had meant to do.
+
+If Uncle Roderick and Uncle John had not believed a word of what
+father told them, they could not have behaved very differently. We
+half thought, sometimes, that they did not believe it. And very likely
+they half thought that we were making it appear that they had done
+something that was not right. And it is the half thoughts that are
+the hard thoughts. "It is very disagreeable," Aunt Roderick used to
+say.
+
+Miss Trixie Spring came over and spent days with us, as of old; and
+when the house looked sweet and pleasant with the shaded summer light,
+and was full of the gracious summer freshness, she would look round
+and shake her head, and say, "It's just as beautiful as it can be. And
+it's a dumb shame. Don't tell _me_!"
+
+Uncle Roderick was going to "take in" the old homestead with his
+share, and that was as much as he cared about; Uncle John was used to
+nothing but stocks and railway shares, and did not want
+"encumbrances"; and as to keeping it as estate property and paying
+rent to the heirs, ourselves included,--nobody wanted that; they would
+rather have things settled up. There would always be questions of
+estimates and repairs; it was not best to have things so in a family.
+Separate accounts as well as short ones, made best friends. We knew
+they all thought father was unlucky to have to do with in such
+matters. He would still be the "limited" man of the family. It would
+take two thirds of his inheritance to pay off those old '57 debts.
+
+So we took our lovely Westover summer days as things we could not have
+any more of. And when you begin to feel that about anything, it would
+be a relief to have had the last of it. Nothing lasts always; but we
+like to have the forever-and-ever feeling, however delusive. A child
+hates his Sunday clothes, because he knows he cannot put them on again
+on Monday.
+
+With all our troubles, there was one pleasure in the house,--Arctura.
+We had made an art-kitchen; now we were making a little poem of a
+serving-maiden. We did not turn things over to her, and so leave chaos
+to come again; we only let her help; we let her come in and learn with
+us the nice and pleasant ways that we had learned. We did not move the
+kitchen down stairs again; we were determined not to have a kitchen
+any more.
+
+Arctura was strong and blithe; she could fetch and carry, make fires,
+wash dishes, clean knives and brasses, do all that came hardest to us;
+and could do, in other things, with and for us, what she saw us do. We
+all worked together till the work was done; then Arctura sat down in
+the afternoons, just as we did, and read books, or made her clothes.
+She always looked nice and pretty. She had large dark calico aprons
+for her work; and little white bib-aprons for table-tending and
+dress-up; and mother made for her, on the machine, little linen
+collars and cuffs.
+
+We had a pride in her looks; and she knew it; she learned to work as
+delicately as we did. When breakfast or dinner was ready, she was as
+fit to turn round and serve as we were to sit down; she was astonished
+herself, at ways and results that she fell in with and attained.
+
+"Why, where does the dirt go to?" she would exclaim. "It never gethers
+anywheres."
+
+"GATHERS,--_anywhere_" Rosamond corrected.
+
+Arctura learned little grammar lessons, and other such things, by the
+way. She was only "next" below us in our family life; there was no
+great gulf fixed. We felt that we had at least got hold of the right
+end of one thread in the social tangle. This, at any rate, had come
+out of our year at Westover.
+
+"Things seem so easy," the girl would say. "It is just like two times
+one."
+
+So it was; because we did not jumble in all the Analysis and Compound
+Proportion of housekeeping right on top of the multiplication-table.
+She would get on by degrees; by and by she would be in evolution and
+geometrical progression without knowing how she got there. If you want
+a house, you must build it up, stone by stone, and stroke by stroke;
+if you want a servant, you, or somebody for you, must _build_ one,
+just the same; they do not spring up and grow, neither can be "knocked
+together." And I tell you, busy, eager women of this day, wanting
+great work out of doors, this is just what "we girls," some of
+us,--and some of the best of us, perhaps,--have got to stay at home
+awhile and do.
+
+"It is one of the little jobs that has been waiting for a good while
+to be done," says Barbara; "and Miss Pennington has found out another.
+'There may be,' she says, 'need of women for reorganizing town
+meetings; I won't undertake to say there isn't; but I'm _sure_ there's
+need of them for reorganizing _parlor_ meetings. They are getting to
+be left altogether to the little school-girl "sets." Women who have
+grown older, and can see through all that nonsense, and have the
+position and power to break it up, ought to take hold. Don't you think
+so? Don't you think it is the duty of women of my age and class to see
+to this thing before it grows any worse?' And I told her,--right up,
+respectful,--Yes'm; it wum! Think of her asking me, though!"
+
+Just as things were getting to be so different and so nice on West
+Hill, it seemed so hard to leave it! Everything reminded us of that.
+
+A beautiful plan came up for Ruth, though, at this time. What with
+the family worries,--which Ruth always had a way of gathering to
+herself, and hugging up, prickers in, as if so she could keep the
+nettles from other people's fingers,--and her hard work at her music,
+she was getting thin. We were all insisting that she must take a
+vacation this summer, both from teaching and learning; when, all at
+once, Miss Pennington made up her mind to go to West Point and Lake
+George, and to take Penelope with her; and she came over and asked
+Ruth to go too.
+
+"If you don't mind a room alone, dear; I'm an awful coward to have
+come of a martial family, and I must have Pen with me nights. I'm
+nervous about cars, too; I want two of you to keep up a chatter; I
+should be miserable company for one, always distracted after the
+whistles."
+
+Ruth's eyes shone; but she colored up, and her thanks had half a doubt
+in them. She would tell Auntie: and they would think how it could be.
+
+"What a nice way for you to go!" said Barbara, after Miss Pennington
+left. "And how nice it will be for you to see Dakie!" At which Ruth
+colored up again, and only said that "it would certainly be the nicest
+possible way to go, if she were to go at all."
+
+Barbara meant--or meant to be understood that she meant--that Miss
+Pennington knew everybody, and belonged among the general officers;
+Ruth had an instinct that it would only be possible for her to go by
+an invitation like this from people out of her own family.
+
+"But doesn't it seem queer she should choose me, out of us all?" she
+asked. "Doesn't it seem selfish for me to be the one to go?"
+
+"Seem selfish? Whom to?" said Barbara, bluntly. "We weren't asked."
+
+"I wish--everybody--knew that," said Ruth.
+
+Making this little transparent speech, Ruth blushed once more. But she
+went, after all. She said we pushed her out of the nest. She went out
+into the wide, wonderful world, for the very first time in her life.
+
+This is one of her letters:--
+
+DEAR MOTHER AND GIRLS:--It is perfectly lovely here. I wish you could
+sit where I do this morning, looking up the still river in the bright
+light, with the tender purple haze on the far-off hills, and long,
+low, shady Constitution Island lying so beautiful upon the water on
+one side, and dark shaggy Cro' Nest looming up on the other. The
+Parrott guns at the foundry, over on the headland opposite, are
+trying,--as they are trying almost all the time,--against the face of
+the high, old, desolate cliff; and the hurtling buzz of the shells
+keeps a sort of slow, tremendous time-beat on the air.
+
+I think I am almost more interested in Constitution Island than in any
+other part of the place. I never knew until I came here that it was
+the home of the Misses Warner; the place where Queechy came from, and
+Dollars and Cents, and the Wide, Wide World. It seems so strange to
+think that they sit there and write still, lovely stories while all
+this parade and bustle and learning how to fight are going on close
+beside and about them.
+
+The Cadets are very funny. They will do almost any thing for
+mischief,--the frolic of it, I mean. Dakie Thayne tells us very
+amusing stories. They are just going into camp now; and they have
+parades and battery-practice every day. They have target-firing at old
+Cro' Nest,--which has to stand all the firing from the north battery,
+just around here from the hotel. One day the cadet in charge made a
+very careful sighting of his piece; made the men train the gun up and
+down, this way and that, a hair more or a hair less, till they were
+nearly out of patience; when, lo! just as he had got "a beautiful
+bead," round came a superintending officer, and took a look too. The
+bad boy had drawn it full on a poor old black cow! I do not believe he
+would have really let her be blown up; but Dakie says,--"Well, he
+rather thinks,--if she would have stood still long enough,--he would
+have let her be--astonished!"
+
+The walk through the woods, around the cliff, over the river, is
+beautiful. If only they wouldn't call it by such a silly name!
+
+We went out to Old Fort Putnam yesterday. I did not know how afraid
+Miss Pennington could be of a little thing before. I don't know, now,
+how much of it was fun; for, as Dakie Thayne said, it was agonizingly
+funny. What must have happened to him after we got back and he left us
+I cannot imagine; he didn't laugh much there, and it must have been a
+misery of politeness.
+
+We had been down into the old, ruinous enclosure; had peeped in at the
+dark, choked-up casemates; and had gone round and come up on the edge
+of the broken embankment, which we were following along to where it
+sloped down safely again,--when, just at the very middle and highest
+and most impossible point, down sat Miss Elizabeth among the stones,
+and declared she could neither go back nor forward. She had been
+frightened to death all the way, and now her head was quite gone. "No;
+nothing should persuade her; she never could get up on her feet again
+in that dreadful place." She laughed in the midst of it; but she was
+really frightened, and there she sat; Dakie went to her, and tried to
+help her up, and lead her on; but she would not be helped. "What would
+come of it?" "She didn't know; she supposed that was the end of her;
+_she_ couldn't do anything." "But, dear Miss Pennington," says Dakie,
+"are you going to break short off with life, right here, and make a
+Lady Simon Stylites of yourself?" "For all she knew; she never could
+get down." I think we must have been there, waiting and coaxing,
+nearly half an hour, before she began to _hitch_ along; for walk she
+wouldn't, and she didn't. She had on a black Ernani dress, and a nice
+silk underskirt; and as she lifted herself along with her hands, hoist
+after hoist sidewise, of course the thin stuff dragged on the rocks
+and began to go to pieces. By the time she came to where she could
+stand, she was a rebus of the Coliseum,--"a noble wreck in ruinous
+perfection." She just had to tear off the long tatters, and roll them
+up in a bunch, and fling them over into a hollow, and throw the two or
+three breadths that were left over her arm, and walk home in her silk
+petticoat, itself much the sufferer from dust and fray, though we did
+all we could for her with pocket-handkerchiefs.
+
+"What _has_ happened to Miss Pennington?" said Mrs. General M----, as
+we came up on the piazza.
+
+"Nothing," said Dakie, quite composed and proper, "only she got tired
+and sat down; and it was dusty,--that was all." He bowed and went off,
+without so much as a glance of secret understanding.
+
+"A joke has as many lives as a cat, here," he told Pen and me,
+afterwards, "and that was _too_ good not to keep to ourselves."
+
+Dear little mother and girls,--I have told stories and described
+describes, and all to crowd out and leave to the last corner _such_ a
+thing that Dakie Thayne wants to do! We got to talking about Westover
+and last summer, and the pleasant old place, and all; and I couldn't
+help telling him something about the worry. I know I had no business
+to; and I am afraid I have made a snarl. He says he would like to buy
+the place! And he wanted to know if Uncle Stephen wouldn't rent it of
+him if he did! Just think of it,--that boy! I believe he really means
+to write to Chicago, to his guardian. Of course it never came into my
+head when I told him; it wouldn't at any rate, and I never think of
+_his_ having such a quantity of money. He seems just like--as far as
+that goes--any other boy. What shall I do? Do you believe he will?
+
+P.S. Saturday morning. I feel better about that Poll Parroting of
+mine, to-day. I have had another talk with Dakie. I don't believe he
+will write; now, at any rate. O girls! this is just the most perfect
+morning!
+
+Tell Stephen I've got a _splendid_ little idea, on purpose for him and
+me. Something I can hardly keep to myself till I get home. Dakie
+Thayne put it into my head. He is just the brightest boy, about
+everything! I begin to feel in a hurry almost, to come back. I don't
+think Miss Pennington will go to Lake George, after all. She says she
+hates to leave the Point, so many of her old friends are here. But Pen
+and I think she is afraid of the steamers.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Ruth got home a week after this; a little fatter, a little browner,
+and a little merrier and more talkative than she had ever been before.
+
+Stephen was in a great hurry about the splendid little mysterious
+idea, of course. Boys never can wait, half so well as girls, for
+anything.
+
+We were all out on the balcony that night before dusk, as usual. Ruth
+got up suddenly, and went into the house for something. Stephen went
+straight in after her. What happened upon that, the rest of us did not
+know till afterward. But it is a nice little part of the story,--just
+because there is so precious little of it.
+
+Ruth went round, through the brown room and the hall, to the front
+door. Stephen found her stooping down, with her face close to the
+piazza cracks.
+
+"Hollo! what's the matter? Lost something?"
+
+Ruth lifted up her head. "Hush!"
+
+"Why, how your face shines! What _is_ up?"
+
+"It's the sunset. I mean--that shines. Don't say anything. Our
+splendid--little--idea, you know. It's under here."
+
+"Be dar--never-minded, if mine is!"
+
+"You don't know. Columbus didn't know where his idea was--exactly. Do
+you remember when Sphinx hid her kittens under here last summer?
+Brought 'em round, over the wood-pile in the shed, and they never
+knew their way out till she showed 'em?"
+
+"It _isn't_ about kittens!"
+
+"Hasn't Old Ma'amselle got some now?"
+
+"Yes; four."
+
+"Couldn't you bring up one--or two--to-morrow morning _early_, and
+make a place and tuck 'em in here, under the step, and put back the
+sod, and fasten 'em up?"
+
+"What--_for_?" with wild amazement.
+
+"I can't do what I want to, just for an idea. It will make a noise,
+and I don't feel sure enough. There had better be a kitten. I'll tell
+you the rest to-morrow morning." And Ruth was up on her two little
+feet, and had given Stephen a kiss, and was back into the house, and
+round again to the balcony, before he could say another word.
+
+Boys like a plan, though; especially a mysterious getting-up-early
+plan; and if it has cats in it, it is always funny. He made up his
+mind to be on hand.
+
+Ruth was first, though. She kept her little bolt drawn all night,
+between her room and that of Barbara and Rose. At five o'clock, she
+went softly across the passage to Stephen's room, in her little
+wrapper and knit slippers. "I shall be ready in ten minutes," she
+whispered, right into his ear, and into his dream.
+
+"Scat!" cried Stephen, starting up bewildered.
+
+And Ruth "scatted."
+
+Down on the front piazza, twenty minutes after, she superintended the
+tucking in of the kittens, and then told him to bring a mallet and
+wedge. She had been very particular to have the kittens put under at a
+precise place, though there was a ready-made hole farther on. The cat
+babies mewed and sprawled and dragged themselves at feeble length on
+their miserable little legs, as small blind kittiewinks are given to
+doing.
+
+"They won't go far," said Ruth. "Now, let's take this board up."
+
+"What--_for_?" cried Stephen, again.
+
+"To get them out, of course," says Ruth.
+
+"Well, if girls ain't queer! Queerer than cats!"
+
+"Hush!" said Ruth, softly. "I _believe_--but I don't dare say a word
+yet--there's something there!"
+
+"Of course there is. Two little yowling--"
+
+"Something we all want found, Steve," Ruth whispered, earnestly. "But
+I don't know. Do hush! Make haste!"
+
+Stephen put down his face to the crack, and took a peep. Rather a long
+serious peep. When he took his face back again, "I _see_ something,"
+he said. "It's white paper. Kind of white, that is. Do you suppose,
+Ruth--? My cracky! if you do!"
+
+"We won't suppose," said Ruth. "We'll hammer."
+
+Stephen knocked up the end of the board with the mallet, and then he
+got the wedge under and pried. Ruth pulled. Stephen kept hammering and
+prying, and Ruth held on to all he gained, until they slipped the
+wedge along gradually, to where the board was nailed again, to the
+middle joist or stringer. Then a few more vigorous strokes, and a
+little smart levering, and the nails loosened, and one good wrench
+lifted it from the inside timber and they slid it out from under the
+house-boarding.
+
+Underneath lay a long, folded paper, much covered with drifts of
+dust, and speckled somewhat with damp. But it was a dry, sandy place,
+and weather had not badly injured it.
+
+"Stephen, I am sure!" said Ruth, holding Stephen back by the arm.
+"Don't touch it, though! Let it be, right there. Look at that corner,
+that lies opened up a little. Isn't that grandfather's writing?"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It lay deep down, and not directly under. They could scarcely have
+reached it with their hands. Stephen ran into the parlor, and brought
+out an opera-glass that was upon the table there.
+
+"That's bright of you, Steve!" cried Ruth.
+
+Through the glass they discerned clearly the handwriting. They read
+the words, at the upturned corner,--"heirs after him."
+
+"Lay the board back in its place," said Ruth. "It isn't for us to
+meddle with any more. Take the kittens away." Ruth had turned quite
+pale.
+
+Going down to the barn with Stephen, presently, carrying the two
+kittens in her arms, while he had the mallet and wedge,--
+
+"Stephen," said she, "I'm going to do something on my own
+responsibility."
+
+"I should think you had."
+
+"O, that was nothing. I had to do that. I had to make sure before I
+said anything. But now,--I'm going to ask Uncle and Aunt Roderick to
+come over. They ought to be here, you know."
+
+"Why! don't you suppose they will believe, _now_?"
+
+"Stephen Holabird! you're a bad boy! No; of course it isn't _that_."
+Ruth kept right on from the barn, across the field, into the "old
+place."
+
+Mrs. Roderick Holabird was out in the east piazza, watering her house
+plants, that stood in a row against the wall. Her cats always had
+their milk, and her plants their water, before she had her own
+breakfast. It was a good thing about Mrs. Roderick Holabird, and it
+was a good time to take her.
+
+"Aunt Roderick," said Ruth, coming up, "I want you and Uncle to come
+over right after breakfast; or before, if you like; if you please."
+
+It was rather sudden, but for the repeated "ifs."
+
+"_You_ want!" said Mrs. Roderick in surprise. "Who sent you?"
+
+"Nobody. Nobody knows but Stephen and me. Something is going to
+happen." Ruth smiled, as one who has a pleasant astonishment in store.
+She smiled right up out of her heart-faith in Aunt Roderick and
+everybody.
+
+"On the whole, I guess you'd better come right off,--_to_ breakfast!"
+How boldly little Ruth took the responsibility! Mr. and Mrs. Roderick
+had not been over to our house for at least two months. It had seemed
+to happen so. Father always went there to attend to the "business."
+The "papers" were all at grandfather's. All but this one, that the
+"gale" had taken care of.
+
+Uncle Roderick, hearing the voices, came out into the piazza.
+
+"We want you over at our house," repeated Ruth. "Right off, now;
+there's something you ought to see about."
+
+"I don't like mysteries," said Mrs. Roderick, severely, covering her
+curiosity; "especially when children get them up. And it's no matter
+about the breakfast, either way. We can walk across, I suppose, Mr.
+Holabird, and see what it is all about. Kittens, I dare say."
+
+"Yes," said Ruth, laughing out; "it _is_ kittens, partly. Or was."
+
+So we saw them, from mother's room window, all coming along down the
+side-hill path together.
+
+We always went out at the front door to look at the morning. Arctura
+had set the table, and baked the biscuits; we could breathe a little
+first breath of life, nowadays, that did not come out of the oven.
+
+Father was in the door-way. Stephen stood, as if he had been put
+there, over the loose board, that we did not know was loose.
+
+Ruth brought Uncle and Aunt Roderick up the long steps, and so around.
+
+"Good morning," said father, surprised. "Why, Ruth, what is it?" And
+he met them right on that very loose board; and Stephen stood stock
+still, pertinaciously in the way, so that they dodged and blundered
+about him.
+
+"Yes, Ruth; what is it?" said Mrs. Roderick Holabird.
+
+Then Ruth, after she had got the family solemnly together, began to be
+struck with the solemnity. Her voice trembled.
+
+"I didn't mean to make a fuss about it; only I knew you would all
+care, and I wanted--Stephen and I have found something, mother!" She
+turned to Mrs. Stephen Holabird, and took her hand, and held it hard.
+
+Stephen stooped down, and drew out the loose board. "Under there,"
+said he; and pointed in.
+
+They could all see the folded paper, with the drifts of dust upon it,
+just as it had lain for almost a year.
+
+"It has been there ever since the day of the September Gale, father,"
+he said. "The day, you know, that grandfather was here."
+
+"Don't you remember the wind and the papers?" said Ruth. "It was
+remembering that, that put it into our heads. I never thought of the
+cracks and--" with a little, low, excited laugh--"the 'total depravity
+of inanimate things,' till--just a little while ago."
+
+She did not say a word about that bright boy at West Point, now,
+before them all.
+
+Uncle Roderick reached in with the crook of his cane, and drew
+forward the packet, and stooped down and lifted it up. He shook off
+the dust and opened it. He glanced along the lines, and at the
+signature. Not a single witnessing name. No matter. Uncle Roderick is
+an honest man. He turned round and held it out to father.
+
+"It is your deed of gift," said he; and then they two shook hands.
+
+"There!" said Ruth, tremulous with gladness. "I knew they would. That
+was it. That was why. I told you, Stephen!"
+
+"No, you didn't," said Stephen. "You never told me anything--but
+cats."
+
+"Well! I'm sure I am glad it is all settled," said Mrs. Roderick
+Holabird, after a pause; "and nobody has any hard thoughts to lay up."
+
+They would not stop to breakfast; they said they would come another
+time.
+
+But Aunt Roderick, just before she went away, turned round and kissed
+Ruth. She is a supervising, regulating kind of a woman, and very
+strict about--well, other people's--expenditures; but she was glad
+that the "hard thoughts" were lifted off from her.
+
+        *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I knew," said Ruth, again, "that we were all good people, and that it
+must come right."
+
+"Don't tell _me!_" says Miss Trixie, intolerantly. "She couldn't help
+herself."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+BARBARA'S BUZZ.
+
+
+Leslie Goldthwaite's world of friendship is not a circle. Or if it is,
+it is the far-off, immeasurable horizon that holds all of life and
+possibility.
+
+"You must draw the line somewhere," people say. "You cannot be
+acquainted with everybody."
+
+But Leslie's lines are only radii. They reach out to wherever there is
+a sympathy; they hold fast wherever they have once been joined.
+Consequently, she moves to laws that seem erratic to those for whom a
+pair of compasses can lay down the limit. Consequently, her wedding
+was "odd."
+
+If Olivia Marchbanks had been going to be married there would have
+been a "circle" invited. Nobody would have been left out; nobody would
+have been let in. She had lived in this necromantic ring; she would
+be married in it; she would die and be buried in it; and of all the
+wide, rich, beautiful champaign of life beyond,--of all its noble
+heights, and hidden, tender hollows,--its gracious harvest fields, and
+its deep, grand, forest glooms,--she would be content, elegantly and
+exclusively, to know nothing. To her wedding people might come,
+indeed, from a distance,--geographically; but they would come out of a
+precisely corresponding little sphere in some other place, and fit
+right into this one, for the time being, with the most edifying
+sameness.
+
+From the east and the west, the north and the south, they began to
+come, days beforehand,--the people who could not let Leslie
+Goldthwaite be married without being there. There were no proclamation
+cards issued, bearing in imposing characters the announcement of
+"Their Daughter's Marriage," by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron Goldthwaite, after
+the like of which one almost looks to see, and somewhat feels the need
+of, the regular final invocation,--"God save the Commonwealth!"
+
+There had been loving letters sent here and there; old Miss Craydocke,
+up in the mountains, got one, and came down a month earlier in
+consequence, and by the way of Boston. She stayed there at Mrs. Frank
+Scherman's; and Frank and his wife and little Sinsie, the baby,--"she
+isn't Original Sin, as I was," says her mother,--came up to Z----
+together, and stopped at the hotel. Martha Josselyn came from New
+York, and stayed, of course, with the Inglesides.
+
+Martha is a horrible thing, girls; how do you suppose I dare to put
+her in here as I do? She is a milliner. And this is how it happens.
+Her father is a comparatively poor man,--a book-keeper with a salary.
+There are ever so many little Josselyns; and Martha has always felt
+bound to help. She is not very likely to marry, and she is not one to
+take it into her calculation, if she were; but she is of the sort who
+are said to be "cut out for old maids," and she knows it. She could
+not teach music, nor keep a school, her own schooling--not her
+education; God never lets that be cut short--was abridged by the need
+of her at home. But she could do anything in the world with scissors
+and needle; and she can make just the loveliest bonnets that ever were
+put together.
+
+So, as she can help more by making two bonnets in a day, and getting
+six dollars for them beside the materials, she lets her step-mother
+put out her impossible sewing, and has turned a little second-story
+room in her father's house into a private millinery establishment. She
+will only take the three dollars apiece, beyond the actual cost, for
+her bonnets, although she might make a fortune if she would be
+rapacious; for she says that pays her fairly for her time, and she has
+made up her mind to get through the world fairly, if there is any
+breathing-space left for fairness in it. If not, she can stop
+breathing, and go where there is.
+
+She gets as much to do as she can take. "Miss Josselyn" is one of the
+little unadvertised resources of New York, which it is very knowing,
+and rather elegant, to know about. But it would not be at all elegant
+to have her at a party. Hence, Mrs. Van Alstyne, who had a little
+bonnet, of black lace and nasturtiums, at this very time, that Martha
+Josselyn had made for her, was astonished to find that she was Mrs.
+Ingleside's sister and had come on to the marriage.
+
+General and Mrs. Ingleside--Leslie's cousin Delight--had come from
+their away-off, beautiful Wisconsin home, and brought little
+three-year-old Rob and Rob's nurse with them. Sam Goldthwaite was at
+home from Philadelphia, where he is just finishing his medical
+course,--and Harry was just back again from the Mediterranean; so that
+Mrs. Goldthwaite's house was full too. Jack could not be here; they
+all grieved over that. Jack is out in Japan. But there came a
+wonderful "solid silk" dress, and a lovely inlaid cabinet, for
+Leslie's wedding present,--the first present that arrived from
+anybody; sent the day he got the news;--and Leslie cried over them,
+and kissed them, and put the beautiful silk away, to be made up in the
+fashion next year, when Jack comes home; and set his picture on the
+cabinet, and put his letters into it, and says she does not know what
+other things she shall find quite dear enough to keep them company.
+
+Last of all, the very day before the wedding, came old Mr. Marmaduke
+Wharne. And of all things in the world, he brought her a telescope.
+"To look out at creation with, and keep her soul wide," he says, and
+"to put her in mind of that night when he first found her out, among
+the Hivites and the Hittites and the Amalekites, up in Jefferson, and
+took her away among the planets, out of the snarl."
+
+Miss Craydocke has been all summer making a fernery for Leslie; and
+she took two tickets in the cars, and brought it down beside her, on
+the seat, all the way from Plymouth, and so out here. How they could
+get it to wherever they are going we all wondered, but Dr. Hautayne
+said it should go; he would have it most curiously packed, in a box on
+rollers, and marked,--"Dr. J. Hautayne, U.S. Army. Valuable scientific
+preparations; by no means to be turned or shaken." But he did say,
+with a gentle prudence,--"If somebody should give you an observatory,
+or a greenhouse, I think we might have to stop at _that_, dear."
+
+Nobody did, however. There was only one more big present, and that did
+not come. Dakie Thayne knew better. He gave her a magnificent copy of
+the Sistine Madonna, which his father had bought in Italy, and he
+wrote her that it was to be boxed and sent after her to her home.
+_He_ did not say that it was magnificent; Leslie wrote that to us
+afterward, herself. She said it made it seem as if one side of her
+little home had been broken through and let in heaven.
+
+We were all sorry that Dakie could not be here. They waited till
+September for Harry; "but who," wrote Dakie, "could expect a military
+engagement to wait till all the stragglers could come up? I have given
+my consent and my blessing; all I ask is that you will stop at West
+Point on your way." And that was what they were going to do.
+
+Arabel Waite and Delia made all the wedding dresses. But Mrs.
+Goldthwaite had her own carefully perfected patterns, adjusted to a
+line in every part. Arabel meekly followed these, and saved her whole,
+fresh soul to pour out upon the flutings and finishing.
+
+It was a morning wedding, and a pearl of days. The summer had not gone
+from a single leaf. Only the parch and the blaze were over, and
+beautiful dews had cooled away their fever. The day-lilies were white
+among their broad, tender green leaves, and the tube-roses had come in
+blossom. There were beds of red and white carnations, heavy with
+perfume. The wide garden porch, into which double doors opened from
+the summer-room where they were married, showed these, among the
+grass-walks of the shady, secluded place, through its own splendid
+vista of trumpet-hung bignonia vines.
+
+Everybody wanted to help at this wedding who could help. Arabel Waite
+asked to be allowed to pour out coffee, or something. So in a black
+silk gown, and a new white cap, she took charge of the little room up
+stairs, where were coffee and cakes and sandwiches for the friends who
+came from a distance by the train, and might be glad of something to
+eat at twelve o'clock. Delia offered, "if she only might," to assist
+in the dining-room, where the real wedding collation stood ready. And
+even our Arctura came and asked if she might be "lent," to "open
+doors, or anything." The regular maids of the house found labor so
+divided that it was a festival day all through.
+
+Arctura looked as pretty a little waiting-damsel as might be seen, in
+her brown, two-skirted, best delaine dress, and her white, ruffled,
+muslin bib-apron, her nicely arranged hair, braided up high around her
+head and frizzed a little, gently, at the front,--since why shouldn't
+she, too, have a bit of the fashion?--and tied round with a soft,
+simple white ribbon. Delia had on a violet-and-white striped pique,
+quite new, with a ruffled apron also; and her ribbon was white, too,
+and she had a bunch of violets and green leaves upon her bosom. We
+cared as much about their dress as they did about ours. Barbara
+herself had pinched Arctura's crimps, and tied the little white bow
+among-them.
+
+Every room in the house was attended.
+
+"There never was such pretty serving," said Mrs. Van Alstyne,
+afterward. "Where _did_ they get such people?--And beautiful serving,"
+she went on, reverting to her favorite axiom, "is, after all, the very
+soul of living!"
+
+"Yes, ma'am," said Barbara, gravely. "I think we shall find that true
+always."
+
+Opposite the door into the garden porch were corresponding ones into
+the hall, and directly down to these reached the last flight of the
+staircase, that skirted the walls at the back with its steps and
+landings. We could see Leslie all the way, as she came down, with her
+hand in her father's arm.
+
+She descended beside him like a softly accompanying white cloud; her
+dress was of tulle, without a hitch or a puff or a festoon about it.
+It had two skirts, I believe, but they were plain-hemmed, and fell
+like a mist about her figure. Underneath was no rustling silk, or
+shining satin; only more mist, of finest, sheerest quaker-muslin; you
+could not tell where the cloud met the opaque of soft, unstarched
+cambric below it all. And from her head to her feet floated the
+shimmering veil, fastened to her hair with only two or three tube-rose
+blooms and the green leaves and white stars of the larger myrtle.
+There was a cluster of them upon her bosom, and she held some in her
+left hand.
+
+Dr. Hautayne looked nobly handsome, as he came forward to her side
+in his military dress; but I think we all had another picture of
+him in our minds,--dusty, and battle-stained, bareheaded, in his
+shirt-sleeves, as he rode across the fire to save men's lives. When a
+man has once looked like that, it does not matter how he ever merely
+_looks_ again.
+
+Marmaduke Wharne stood close by Ruth, during the service. She saw his
+gray, shaggy brows knit themselves into a low, earnest frown, as he
+fixedly watched and listened; but there was a shining underneath, as
+still water-drops shine under the gray moss of some old, cleft rock;
+and a pleasure upon the lines of the rough-cast face, that was like
+the tender glimmering of a sunbeam.
+
+When Marmaduke Wharne first saw John Hautayne, he put his hand upon
+his shoulder, and held him so, while he looked him hardly in the face.
+
+"Do you think you deserve her, John?" the old man said. And John
+looked him back, and answered straightly, "No!" It was not mere apt
+and effective reply; there was an honest heartful on the lips and in
+the eyes; and Leslie's old friend let his hand slip down along the
+strong, young arm, until it grasped the answering hand, and said
+again,--
+
+"Perhaps, then, John,--you'll do!"
+
+"Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?" That is what the
+church asks, in her service, though nobody asked it here to-day. But
+we all felt we had a share to give of what we loved so much. Her
+father and her mother gave; her girl friends gave; Miss Trixie Spring,
+Arabel Waite, Delia, little Arctura, the home-servants, gathered in
+the door-way, all gave; Miss Craydocke, crying, and disdaining her
+pocket-handkerchief till the tears trickled off her chin, because she
+was smiling also and would not cover _that_ up,--gave; and nobody gave
+with a more loving wrench out of a deep heart, than bluff old frowning
+Marmaduke Wharne.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Nobody knows the comfort that we Holabirds took, though, in those
+autumn days, after all this was over, in our home; feeling every
+bright, comfortable minute, that our home was our own. "It is so nice
+to have it to love grandfather by," said Ruth, like a little child.
+
+"Everything is so pleasant," said Barbara, one sumptuous morning.
+"I've so many nice things that I can choose among to do. I feel like a
+bee in a barrel of sugar. I don't know where to begin." Barbara had a
+new dress to make; she had also a piece of worsted work to begin; she
+had also two new books to read aloud, that Mrs. Scherman had brought
+up from Boston.
+
+We felt rich in much prospectively; we could afford things better now;
+we had proposed and arranged a book-club; Miss Pennington and we were
+to manage it; Mrs. Scherman was to purchase for us. Ruth was to have
+plenty of music. Life was full and bright to us, this golden
+autumn-time, as it had never been before. The time itself was radiant;
+and the winter was stored beforehand with pleasures; Arctura was as
+glad as anybody; she hears our readings in the afternoons, when she
+can come up stairs, and sit mending stockings or hemming aprons.
+
+We knew, almost for the first time, what it was to be without any
+pressure of anxiety. We dared to look round the house and see what was
+wearing out. We could replace things--_some_, at any rate--as well as
+not; so we had the delight of choosing, and the delight of putting by;
+it was a delicious perplexity. We all felt like Barbara's bee; and
+when she said that once she said it for every day, all through the new
+and happy time.
+
+It was wonderful how little there was, after all, that we did want in
+any hurry. We thought it over. We did not care to carpet the
+dining-room; we liked the drugget and the dark wood-margins better. It
+came down pretty nearly, at last, so far as household improvements
+were concerned, to a new broadcloth cover for the great family table
+in the brown-room.
+
+Barbara's _bee_-havior, however, had its own queer fluctuations at
+this time, it must be confessed. Whatever the reason was, it was not
+altogether to be depended on. It had its alternations of humming
+content with a good deal of whimsical bouncing and buzzing and the
+most unpredictable flights. To use a phrase of Aunt Trixie's applied
+to her childhood, but coming into new appropriateness now, Barbara
+"acted like a witch."
+
+She began at the wedding. Only a minute or two before Leslie came
+down, Harry Goldthwaite moved over to where she stood just a little
+apart from the rest of us, by the porch door, and placed himself
+beside her, with some little commonplace word in a low tone, as
+befitted the hushed expectancy of the moment.
+
+All at once, with an "O, I forgot!" she started away from him in the
+abruptest fashion, and glanced off across the room, and over into a
+little side parlor beyond the hall, into which she certainly had not
+been before that day. She could have "forgotten" nothing there; but
+she doubtless had just enough presence of mind not to rush up the
+staircase toward the dressing-rooms, at the risk of colliding with the
+bridal party. When Leslie an instant later came in at the double
+doors, Mrs. Holabird caught sight of Barbara again just sliding into
+the far, lower corner of the room by the forward entrance, where she
+stood looking out meekly between the shoulders and the floating
+cap-ribbons of Aunt Trixie Spring and Miss Arabel Waite during the
+whole ceremony.
+
+Whether it was that she felt there was something dangerous in the air,
+or that Harry Goldthwaite had some new awfulness in her eyes from
+being actually a commissioned officer,--Ensign Goldthwaite, now,
+(Rose had borrowed from the future, for the sake of euphony and
+effect, when she had so retorted feet and dignities upon her last
+year,)--we could not guess; but his name or presence seemed all at
+once a centre of electrical disturbances in which her whisks and
+whirls were simply to be wondered at.
+
+"I don't see why he should tell _me_ things," was what she said to
+Rosamond one day, when she took her to task after Harry had gone, for
+making off almost before he had done speaking, when he had been
+telling us of the finishing of some business that Mr. Goldthwaite had
+managed for him in Newburyport. It was the sale of a piece of property
+that he had there, from his father, of houses and building-lots that
+had been unprofitable to hold, because of uncertain tenants and high
+taxes, but which were turned now into a comfortable round sum of
+money.
+
+"I shall not be so poor now, as if I had only my pay," said Harry. At
+which Barbara had disappeared.
+
+"Why, you were both there!" said Barbara.
+
+"Well, yes; we were there in a fashion. He was sitting by you, though,
+and he looked up at you, just then. It did not seem very friendly."
+
+"I'm sure I didn't notice; I don't see why he should tell me things,"
+said whimsical Barbara.
+
+"Well, perhaps he will stop," said Rose, quietly, and walked away.
+
+It seemed, after a while, as if he would. He could not understand
+Barbara in these days. All her nice, cordial, honest ways were gone.
+She was always shying at something. Twice he was here, when she did
+not come into the room until tea-time.
+
+"There are so many people," she said, in her unreasonable manner.
+"They make me nervous, looking and listening."
+
+We had Miss Craydocke and Mrs. Scherman with us then. We had asked
+them to come and spend a week with us before they left Z----.
+
+Miss Craydocke had found Barbara one evening, in the twilight,
+standing alone in one of the brown-room windows. She had come up, in
+her gentle, old-friendly way, and stood beside her.
+
+"My dear," she said, with the twilight impulse of nearness,--"I am an
+old woman. Aren't you pushing something away from you, dear?"
+
+"Ow!" said Barbara, as if Miss Craydocke had pinched her. And poor
+Miss Craydocke could only walk away again.
+
+When it came to Aunt Roderick, though, it was too much. Aunt Roderick
+came over a good deal now. She had quite taken us into unqualified
+approval again, since we had got the house. She approved herself also.
+As if it was she who had died and left us something, and looked back
+upon it now with satisfaction. At least, as if she had been the
+September Gale, and had taken care of that paper for us.
+
+Aunt Roderick has very good practical eyes; but no sentiment whatever.
+"It seems to me, Barbara, that you are throwing away your
+opportunities," she said, plainly.
+
+Barbara looked up with a face of bold unconsciousness. She was
+brought to bay, now; Aunt Roderick could exasperate her, but she could
+not touch the nerve, as dear Miss Craydocke could.
+
+"I always am throwing them away," said Barbara. "It's my fashion. I
+never could save corners. I always put my pattern right into the
+middle of my piece, and the other half never comes out, you see. What
+have I done, now? Or what do you think I might do, just at present?"
+
+"I think you might save yourself from being sorry by and by," said
+Aunt Roderick.
+
+"I'm ever so much obliged to you," said Barbara, collectedly. "Just as
+much as if I could understand. But perhaps there'll be some light
+given. I'll turn it over in my mind. In the mean while, Aunt Roderick,
+I just begin to see one very queer thing in the world. You've lived
+longer than I have; I wish you could explain it. There are some things
+that everybody is very delicate about, and there are some that they
+take right hold of. People might have _pocket_-perplexities for years
+and years, and no created being would dare to hint or ask a question;
+but the minute it is a case of heart or soul,--or they think it
+is,--they 'rush right in where angels fear to tread.' What _do_ you
+suppose makes the difference?"
+
+After that, we all let her alone, behave as she might. We saw that
+there could be no meddling without marring. She had been too conscious
+of us all, before anybody spoke. We could only hope there was no real
+mischief done, already.
+
+"It's all of them, every one!" she repeated, half hysterically, that
+day, after her shell had exploded, and Aunt Roderick had retreated,
+really with great forbearance. "Miss Craydocke began, and I had to
+scream at her; even Sin Scherman made a little moral speech about her
+own wild ways, and set that baby crowing over me! And once Aunt Trixie
+'vummed' at me. And I'm sure I ain't doing a single thing!" She
+whimpered and laughed, like a little naughty boy, called to account
+for mischief, and pretending surprised innocence, yet secretly at once
+enjoying and repenting his own badness; and so we had to let her
+alone.
+
+But after a while Harry Goldthwaite stayed away four whole days, and
+then he only came in to say that he was going to Washington to be gone
+a week. It was October, now, and his orders might come any day. Then
+we might not see him again for three years, perhaps.
+
+On the Thursday of that next week, Barbara said she would go down and
+see Mrs. Goldthwaite.
+
+"I think it quite time you should," said Mrs. Holabird. Barbara had
+not been down there once since the wedding-day.
+
+She put her crochet in her pocket, and we thought of course she would
+stay to tea. It was four in the afternoon when she went away.
+
+About an hour later Olivia Marchbanks called.
+
+It came out that Olivia had a move to make. In fact, that she wanted
+to set us all to making moves. She proposed a chess-club, for the
+winter, to bring us together regularly; to include half a dozen
+families, and meet by turn at the different houses.
+
+"I dare say Miss Pennington will have her neighborhood parties
+again," she said; "they are nice, but rather exhausting; we want
+something quiet, to come in between. Something a little more among
+ourselves, you know. Maria Hendee is a splendid chess-player, and so
+is Mark. Maud plays with her father, and Adelaide and I are learning.
+I know you play, Rosamond, and Barbara,--doesn't she? Nobody can
+complain of a chess-club, you see; and we can have a table at whist
+for the elders who like it, and almost always a round game for the
+odds and ends. After supper, we can dance, or anything. Don't you
+think it would do?"
+
+"I think it would do nicely for _one_ thing," said Rose, thoughtfully.
+"But don't let us allow it to be the _whole_ of our winter."
+
+Olivia Marchbanks's face clouded. She had put forward a little pawn of
+compliment toward us, as towards a good point, perhaps, for tempting a
+break in the game. And behold! Rosamond's knight only leaped right
+over it, facing honestly and alertly both ways.
+
+"Chess would be good for nothing less than once a week," said Olivia.
+"I came to you almost the very first, out of the family," she added,
+with a little height in her manner. "I hope you won't break it up."
+
+"Break it up! No, indeed! We were all getting just nicely joined
+together," replied Rosamond, ladylike with perfect temper. "I think
+last winter was so _really good_," she went on; "I should be sorry to
+break up what _that_ did; that is all."
+
+"I'm willing enough to help in those ways," said Olivia,
+condescendingly; "but I think we might have our _own_ things, too."
+
+"I don't know, Olivia," said Rosamond, slowly, "about these 'own
+things.' They are just what begin to puzzle me."
+
+It was the bravest thing our elegant Rosamond had ever done. Olivia
+Marchbanks was angry. She all but took back her invitation.
+
+"Never mind," she said, getting up to take leave. "It must be some
+time yet; I only mentioned it. Perhaps we had better not try to go
+beyond ourselves, after all. Such things are sure to be stupid unless
+everybody is really interested."
+
+Rosamond stood in the hall-door, as she went down the steps and away.
+At the same moment, Barbara, flushed with an evidently hurried walk,
+came in. "Why! what makes you so red, Rose?" she said.
+
+"Somebody has been snubbing somebody," replied Rose, holding her royal
+color, like her namesake, in the midst of a cool repose. "And I don't
+quite know whether it is Olivia Marchbanks or I."
+
+"A color-question between Rose and Barberry!" said Ruth. "What have
+_you_ been doing, Barbie? Why didn't you stay to tea?"
+
+"I? I've been walking, of course.--That boy has got home again," she
+added, half aloud, to Rosamond, as they went up stairs.
+
+We knew _very_ well that she must have been queer to Harry again. He
+would have been certain to walk home with her, if she would have let
+him. But--"all through the town, and up the hill, in the daylight!
+Or--stay to tea with _him_ there, and make him come, in the dark!--And
+_if_ he imagined that I knew!" We were as sure as if she had said it,
+that these were the things that were in her mind, and that these were
+what she had run away from. How she had done it we did not know; we
+had no doubt it had been something awful.
+
+The next morning nobody called. Father came home to dinner and said
+Mr. Goldthwaite had told him that Harry was under orders,--to the
+"Katahdin."
+
+In the afternoon Barbara went out and nailed up the woodbines. Then
+she put on her hat, and took a great bundle that had been waiting for
+a week for somebody to carry, and said she would go round to South
+Hollow with it, to Mrs. Dockery.
+
+"You will be tired to death. You are tired already, hammering at those
+vines," said mother, anxiously. Mothers cannot help daughters much in
+these buzzes.
+
+"I want the exercise," said Barbara, turning away her face that was at
+once red and pale. "Pounding and stamping are good for me." Then she
+came back in a hurry, and kissed mother, and then she went away.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+EMERGENCIES.
+
+
+Mrs. Hobart has a "fire-gown." That is what she calls it; she made it
+for a fire, or for illness, or any night alarm; she never goes to bed
+without hanging it over a chair-back, within instant reach. It is of
+double, bright-figured flannel, with a double cape sewed on; and a
+flannel belt, also sewed on behind, and furnished, for fastening, with
+a big, reliable, easy-going button and button-hole. Up and down the
+front--not too near together--are more big, reliable, easy-going
+buttons and button-holes. A pair of quilted slippers with thick soles
+belong with this gown, and are laid beside it. Then Mrs. Hobart goes
+to bed in peace, and sleeps like the virgin who knows there is oil in
+her vessel.
+
+If Mrs. Roger Marchbanks had known of Mrs. Hobart's fire-gown, and
+what it had been made and waiting for, unconsciously, all these years,
+she might not have given those quiet orders to her discreet, well-bred
+parlor-maid, by which she was never to be "disengaged" when Mrs.
+Hobart called.
+
+Mrs. Hobart has also a gown of very elegant black silk, with deep,
+rich border-folds of velvet, and a black camel's-hair shawl whose
+priceless margin comes up to within three inches of the middle; and in
+these she has turned meekly away from Mrs. Marchbanks's vestibule,
+leaving her inconsequential card, many wondering times; never
+doubting, in her simplicity, that Mrs. Marchbanks was really making
+pies, or doing up pocket-handkerchiefs; only thinking how queer it was
+it always happened so with her.
+
+In her fire-gown she was destined to go in.
+
+Barbara came home dreadfully tired from her walk to Mrs. Dockery's,
+and went to bed at eight o'clock. When one of us does that, it always
+breaks up our evening early. Mother discovered that she was sleepy by
+nine, and by half past we were all in our beds. So we really had a
+fair half night of rest before the alarm came.
+
+It was about one in the morning when Barbara woke, as people do who go
+to bed achingly tired, and sleep hungrily for a few eager hours.
+
+"My gracious! what a moon! What ails it?"
+
+The room was full of red light.
+
+Rosamond sat up beside her.
+
+"Moon! It's fire!"
+
+Then they called Ruth and mother. Father and Stephen were up and out
+of doors in five minutes.
+
+The Roger Marchbanks's stables were blazing. The wind was carrying
+great red cinders straight over on to the house roofs. The buildings
+were a little down on our side of the hill, and a thick plantation of
+evergreens hid them from the town. Everything was still as death but
+the crackling of the flames. A fire in the country, in the dead of
+night, to those first awakened to the knowledge of it, is a stealthily
+fearful, horribly triumphant thing. Not a voice nor a bell smiting the
+air, where all will soon be outcry and confusion; only the fierce,
+busy diligence of the blaze, having all its own awful will, and making
+steadfast headway against the sleeping skill of men.
+
+We all put on some warm things, and went right over.
+
+Father found Mr. Marchbanks, with his gardener, at the back of the
+house, playing upon the scorching frames of the conservatory building
+with the garden engine. Up on the house-roof two other men-servants
+were hanging wet carpets from the eaves, and dashing down buckets of
+water here and there, from the reservoir inside.
+
+Mr. Marchbanks gave father a small red trunk. "Will you take this to
+your house and keep it safe?" he asked. And father hastened away with
+it.
+
+Within the house, women were rushing, half dressed, through the rooms,
+and down the passages and staircases. We went up through the back
+piazza, and met Mrs. Hobart in her fire-gown at the unfastened door.
+There was no card to leave this time, no servant to say that Mrs.
+Marchbanks was "particularly engaged."
+
+Besides her gown, Mrs. Hobart had her theory, all ready for a fire.
+Just exactly what she should do, first and next, and straight through,
+in case of such a thing. She had recited it over to herself and her
+family till it was so learned by heart that she believed no flurry of
+the moment would put it wholly out of their heads.
+
+She went straight up Mrs. Marchbanks's great oak staircase, to go up
+which had been such a privilege for the bidden few. Rough feet would
+go over it, unbidden, to-night.
+
+She met Mrs. Marchbanks at her bedroom door. In the upper story the
+cook and house-maids were handing buckets now to the men outside. The
+fine parlor-maid was down in the kitchen at the force-pump, with
+Olivia and Adelaide to help and keep her at it. A nursery-girl was
+trying to wrap up the younger children in all sorts of wrong things,
+upside down.
+
+"Take these children right over to my house," said Mrs. Hobart.
+"Barbara Holabird! Come up here!"
+
+"I don't know what to do first," said Mrs. Marchbanks, excitedly. "Mr.
+Marchbanks has taken away his papers; but there's all the silver--and
+the pictures--and everything! And the house will be full of men
+directly!" She looked round the room nervously, and went and picked up
+her braided "chignon" from the dressing-table. Mrs. Marchbanks could
+"receive" splendidly; she had never thought what she should do at a
+fire. She knew all the rules of the grammar of life; she had not
+learned anything about the exceptions.
+
+"Elijah! Come up here!" called Mrs. Hobart again, over the balusters.
+And Elijah, Mrs. Hobart's Yankee man-servant, brought up on her
+father's farm, clattered up stairs in his thick boots, that sounded on
+the smooth oak as if a horse were coming.
+
+Mrs. Marchbanks looked bewilderedly around her room again. "They'll
+break everything!" she said, and took down a little Sèvres cup from a
+bracket.
+
+"There, Mrs. Marchbanks! You just go off with the children. I'll see
+to things. Let me have your keys."
+
+"They're all in my upper bureau-drawer," said Mrs. Marchbanks.
+"Besides, there isn't much locked, except the silver. I wish Matilda
+would come." Matilda is Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks. "The children can go
+there, of course."
+
+"It is too far," said Mrs. Hobart. "Go and make them go to bed in my
+great front room. Then you'll feel easier, and can come back. You'll
+want Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks's house for the rest of you, and plenty of
+things besides."
+
+While she was talking she had pulled the blankets and coverlet from
+the bed, and spread them on the floor. Mrs. Marchbanks actually walked
+down stairs with her chignon in one hand and the Sèvres cup in the
+other.
+
+"People _do_ do curious things at fires," said Mrs. Hobart, cool, and
+noticing everything.
+
+She had got the bureau-drawers emptied now into the blankets. Barbara
+followed her lead, and they took all the clothing; from the closets
+and wardrobe.
+
+"Tie those up, Elijah. Carry them off to a safe place, and come back,
+up here."
+
+Then she went to the next room. From that to the next and the next,
+she passed on, in like manner,--Barbara, and by this time the rest of
+us, helping; stripping the beds, and making up huge bundles on the
+floors of the contents of presses, drawers, and boxes.
+
+"Clothes are the first thing," said she. "And this way, you are
+pretty sure to pick up everything." Everything _was_ picked up, from
+Mrs. Marchbanks's jewel-case and her silk dresses, to Mr. Marchbanks's
+shaving brushes, and the children's socks that they had had pulled off
+last night.
+
+Elijah carried them all off, and piled them up in Mrs. Hobart's great
+clean laundry-room to await orders. The men hailed him as he went and
+came, to do this, or fetch that. "I'm doing _one_ thing," he answered.
+"You keep to yourn."
+
+"They're comin'," he said, as he returned after his third trip. "The
+bells are ringin', an' they're a swarmin' up the hill,--two ingines,
+an' a ruck o' boys an' men. Melindy, she's keepin' the laundry door
+locked, an' a lettin' on me in."
+
+Mrs. Marchbanks came hurrying back before the crowd. Some common,
+ecstatic little boys, rushing foremost to the fire, hustled her on her
+own lawn. She could hardly believe even yet in this inevitable
+irruption of the Great Uninvited.
+
+Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks and Maud met her and came in with her. Mr.
+Marchbanks and Arthur had hastened round to the rear, where the other
+gentlemen were still hard at work.
+
+"Now," said Mrs. Hobart, as lightly and cheerily as if it had been the
+putting together of a Christmas pudding, and she were ready for the
+citron or the raisins,--"now--all that beautiful china!"
+
+She had been here at one great, general party, and remembered the
+china, although her party-call, like all her others, had been a
+failure. Mrs. Marchbanks received a good many people in a grand,
+occasional, wholesale civility, to whom she would not sacrifice any
+fraction of her private hours.
+
+Mrs. Hobart found her way by instinct to the china-closet,--the
+china-room, more properly speaking. Mrs. Marchbanks rather followed
+than led.
+
+The shelves, laden with costly pottery, reached from floor to ceiling.
+The polish and the colors flashed already in the fierce light of the
+closely neighboring flames. Great drifts and clouds of smoke against
+the windows were urging in and stifling the air. The first rush of
+water from the engines beat against the walls.
+
+"We must work awful quick now," said Mrs. Hobart. "But keep cool. We
+ain't afire yet."
+
+She gave Mrs. Marchbanks her own keys, which she had brought down
+stairs. That lady opened her safe and took out her silver, which
+Arthur Marchbanks and James Hobart received from her and carried away.
+
+Mrs. Hobart herself went up the step-ladder that stood there before
+the shelves, and began to hand down piles of plates, and heavy single
+pieces. "Keep folks out, Elijah," she ordered to her man.
+
+We all helped. There were a good many of us by this time,--Olivia, and
+Adelaide, and the servant-girls released from below, besides the other
+Marchbankses, and the Hobarts, and people who came in, until Elijah
+stopped them. He shut the heavy walnut doors that led from
+drawing-room and library to the hall, and turned the great keys in
+their polished locks. Then he stood by the garden entrance in the
+sheltered side-angle, through which we passed with our burdens, and
+defended that against invasion. There was now such an absolute order
+among ourselves that the moral force of it repressed the excitement
+without that might else have rushed in and overborne us.
+
+"You jest keep back; it's all right here," Elijah would say,
+deliberately and authoritatively, holding the door against unlicensed
+comers; and boys and men stood back as they might have done outside
+the shine and splendor and privilege of an entertainment.
+
+It lasted till we got well through; till we had gone, one by one, down
+the field, across to our house, the short way, back and forth, leaving
+the china, pile after pile, safe in our cellar-kitchen.
+
+Meanwhile, without our thinking of it, Barbara had been locked out
+upon the stairs. Mother had found a tall Fayal clothes-basket, and had
+collected in it, carefully, little pictures and precious things that
+could be easily moved, and might be as easily lost or destroyed.
+Barbara mounted guard over this, watching for a right person to whom
+to deliver it.
+
+Standing there, like Casabianca, rough men rushed by her to get up to
+the roof. The hall was filling with a crowd, mostly of the curious,
+untrustworthy sort, for the work just then lay elsewhere.
+
+So Barbara held by, only drawing back with the basket, into an angle
+of the wide landing. Nobody must seize it heedlessly; things were only
+laid in lightly, for careful handling. In it were children s
+photographs, taken in days that they had grown away from; little
+treasures of art and remembrance, picked up in foreign travel, or
+gifts of friends; all sorts of priceless odds and ends that people
+have about a house, never thinking what would become of them in a
+night like this. So Barbara stood by.
+
+Suddenly somebody, just come, and springing in at the open door, heard
+his name.
+
+"Harry! Help me with this!" And Harry Goldthwaite pushed aside two men
+at the foot of the staircase, lifted up a small boy and swung him over
+the baluster, and ran up to the landing.
+
+"Take hold of it with me," said Barbara, hurriedly. "It is valuable.
+We must carry it ourselves. Don't let anybody touch it. Over to Mrs.
+Hobart's."
+
+"Hendee!" called out Harry to Mark Hendee, who appeared below. "Keep
+those people off, will you? Make way!" And so they two took the big
+basket steadily by the ears, and went away with it together. The first
+we knew about it was when, on their way back, they came down upon our
+line of march toward Elijah's door.
+
+Beyond this, there was no order to chronicle. So far, it seems longer
+in the telling than it did in the doing. We had to work "awful quick,"
+as Mrs. Hobart said. But the nice and hazardous work was all done.
+Even the press that held the table-napery was emptied to the last
+napkin, and all was safe.
+
+Now the hall doors were thrown open; wagons were driven up to the
+entrances, and loaded with everything that came first, as things are
+ordinarily "saved" at a fire. These were taken over to Mrs. Lewis
+Marchbanks's. Books and pictures, furniture, bedding, carpets;
+quantities were carried away, and quantities were piled up on the
+lawn. The men-servants came and looked after these; they had done all
+they could elsewhere; they left the work to the firemen now, and there
+was little hope of saving the house. The window-frames were smoking,
+and the panes were cracking with the heat, and fire was running along
+the piazza roofs before we left the building. The water was giving
+out.
+
+After that we had to stand and see it burn. The wells and cisterns
+were dry, and the engines stood helpless.
+
+The stable roofs fell in with a crash, and the flames reared up as
+from a great red crater and whirlpool of fire. They lashed forth and
+seized upon charred walls and timbers that were ready, without their
+touch, to spring into live combustion. The whole southwest front of
+the mansion was overswept with almost instant sheets of fire. Fire
+poured in at the casements; through the wide, airy halls; up and into
+the rooms where we had stood a little while before; where, a little
+before that, the children had been safe asleep in their nursery beds.
+
+Mrs. Marchbanks, like any other burnt-out woman, had gone to the home
+that offered to her,--her sister-in-law's; Olivia and Adelaide were
+going to the Haddens; the children were at Mrs. Hobart's; the things
+that, in their rich and beautiful arrangement, had made _home_, as
+well as enshrined the Marchbanks family in their sacredness of
+elegance, were only miscellaneous "loads" now, transported and
+discharged in haste, or heaped up confusedly to await removal. And the
+sleek servants, to whom, doubtless, it had seemed that their Rome
+could never fall, were suddenly, as much as any common Bridgets and
+Patricks, "out of a place."
+
+Not that there would be any permanent difference; it was only the
+story and attitude of a night. The power was still behind; the
+"Tailor" would sew things over again directly. Mrs. Roger Marchbanks
+would be comparatively composed and in order, at Mrs. Lewis's,
+in a few days,--receiving her friends, who would hurry to make
+"fire-calls," as they would to make party or engagement or other
+special occasion visits; the cordons would be stretched again; not one
+of the crowd of people who went freely in and out of her burning rooms
+that night, and worked hardest, saving her library and her pictures
+and her carpets, would come up in cool blood and ring her door-bell
+now; the sanctity and the dignity would be as unprofanable as ever.
+
+It was about four in the morning--the fire still burning--when Mrs.
+Holabird went round upon the out-skirts of the groups of lookers-on,
+to find and gather together her own flock. Rosamond and Ruth stood in
+a safe corner with the Haddens. Where was Barbara?
+
+Down against the close trunks of a cluster of linden-trees had been
+thrown cushions and carpets and some bundles of heavy curtains, and
+the like. Coming up behind, Mrs. Holabird saw, sitting upon this heap,
+two persons. She knew Barbara's hat, with its white gull's breast; but
+somebody had wrapped her up in a great crimson table-cover, with a
+bullion fringe. Somebody was Harry Goldthwaite, sitting there beside
+her; Barbara, with only her head visible, was behaving, out here in
+this unconventional place and time, with a tranquillity and composure
+which of late had been apparently impossible to her in parlors.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"What will Mrs. Marchbanks do with Mrs. Hobart after this, I wonder?"
+Mrs. Holabird heard Harry say.
+
+"She'll give her a sort of brevet," replied Barbara. "For gallant and
+meritorious services. It will be, 'Our friend Mrs. Hobart; a near
+neighbor of ours; she was with us all that terrible night of the fire,
+you know.' It will be a great honor; but it won't be a full
+commission."
+
+Harry laughed.
+
+"Queer things happen when you are with us," said Barbara. "First,
+there was the whirlwind, last year,--and now the fire."
+
+"After the whirlwind and the fire--" said Harry.
+
+"I wasn't thinking of the Old Testament," interrupted Barbara.
+
+"Came a still, small voice," persisted Harry. "If I'm wicked, Barbara,
+I can't help it. You put it into my head."
+
+"I don't see any wickedness," answered Barbara, quickly. "That was the
+voice of the Lord. I suppose it is always coming."
+
+"Then, Barbara--"
+
+Then Mrs. Holabird walked away again.
+
+The next day--_that_ day, after our eleven o'clock breakfast--Harry
+came back, and was at Westover all day long.
+
+Barbara got up into mother's room at evening, alone with her. She
+brought a cricket, and came and sat down beside her, and put her cheek
+upon her knee.
+
+"Mother," she said, softly, "I don't see but you'll have to get me
+ready, and let me go."
+
+"My dear child! When? What do you mean?"
+
+"Right off. Harry is under orders, you know. And they may hardly
+ever be so nice again. And--if we _are_ going through the world
+together--mightn't we as well begin to go?"
+
+"Why, Barbara, you take my breath away! But then you always do! What
+is it?"
+
+"It's the Katahdin, fitting out at New York to join the European
+squadron. Commander Shapleigh is a great friend of Harry's; his wife
+and daughter are in New York, going out, by Southampton steamer, when
+the frigate leaves, to meet him there. They would take me, he says;
+and--that's what Harry wants, mother. There'll be a little while
+first,--as much, perhaps, as we should ever have."
+
+"Barbara, my darling! But you've nothing ready!"
+
+"No, I suppose not. I never do have. Everything is an emergency with
+me; but I always emerge! I can get things in London," she added.
+"Everybody does."
+
+The end of it was that Mrs. Holabird had to catch her breath again, as
+mothers do; and that Barbara is getting ready to be married just as
+she does everything else.
+
+Rose has some nice things--laid away, new; she always has; and mother
+has unsuspected treasures; and we all had new silk dresses for
+Leslie's wedding, and Ruth had a bright idea about that.
+
+"I'm as tall as either of you, now," she said; "and we girls are all
+of a size, as near as can be, mother and all; and we'll just wear the
+dresses once more, you see, and then put them right into Barbara's
+trunk. They'll be all the bonnier and luckier for her, I know. We can
+get others any time."
+
+We laughed at her at first; but we came round afterward to think that
+it was a good plan. Rosamond's silk was a lovely violet, and Ruth's
+was blue; Barbara's own was pearly gray; we were glad, now, that no
+two of us had dressed alike. The violet and the gray had been chosen
+because of our having worn quiet black-and-white all summer for
+grandfather. We had never worn crape; or what is called "deep"
+mourning. "You shall never do that," said mother, "till the deep
+mourning comes. Then you will choose for yourselves."
+
+We have had more time than we expected. There has been some beautiful
+delay or other about machinery,--the Katahdin's, that is; and
+Commander Shapleigh has been ever so kind. Harry has been back and
+forth to New York two or three times. Once he took Stephen with him;
+Steve stayed at Uncle John's; but he was down at the yard, and on
+board ships, and got acquainted with some midshipmen; and he has quite
+made up his mind to try to get in at the Naval Academy as soon as he
+is old enough, and to be a navy officer himself.
+
+We are comfortable at home; not hurried after all. We are determined
+not to be; last days are too precious,
+
+"Don't let's be all taken up with 'things,'" says Barbara. "I can
+_buy_ 'things' any time. But now,--I want you!"
+
+Aunt Roderick's present helped wonderfully. It was magnanimous of her;
+it was coals of fire. We should have believed she was inspired,--or
+possessed,--but that Ruth went down to Boston with her.
+
+There came home, in a box, two days after, from Jordan and Marsh's,
+the loveliest "suit," all made and finished, of brown poplin. To think
+of Aunt Roderick's getting anything _made_, at an "establishment"! But
+Ruth says she put her principles into her unpickable pocket, and just
+took her porte-monnaie in her hand.
+
+Bracelets and pocket-handkerchiefs have come from New York; all the
+"girls" here in Westover have given presents of ornaments, or little
+things to wear; they know there is no housekeeping to provide for.
+Barbara says her trousseau "flies together"; she just has to sit and
+look at it.
+
+She has begged that old garnet and white silk, though, at last, from
+mother. Ruth saw her fold it up and put it, the very first thing, into
+the bottom of her new trunk. She patted it down gently, and gave it a
+little stroke, just as she pats and strokes mother herself sometimes.
+
+"_All_ new things are only dreary," she says. "I must have some of the
+old."
+
+"I should just like to know one thing,--if I might," said Rosamond,
+deferentially, after we had begun to go to bed one evening. She was
+sitting in her white night-dress, on the box-sofa, with her shoe
+in her hand. "I should just like to know what made you behave so
+beforehand, Barbara?"
+
+"I was in a buzz," said Barbara. "And it _was_ beforehand. I suppose I
+knew it was coming,--like a thunderstorm."
+
+"You came pretty near securing that it _shouldn't_ come," said
+Rosamond, "after all."
+
+"I couldn't help that; it wasn't my part of the affair."
+
+"You might have just kept quiet, as you were before," said Rose.
+
+"Wait and see," said Barbara, concisely. "People shouldn't come
+bringing things in their hands. It's just like going down stairs to
+get these presents. The very minute I see a corner of one of those
+white paper parcels, don't I begin to look every way, and say all
+sorts of things in a hurry? Wouldn't I like to turn my back and run
+off if I could? Why don't they put them under the sofa, or behind the
+door, I wonder?"
+
+"After all--" began Rosamond, still with the questioning inflection.
+
+"After all--" said Barbara, "there was the fire. That, luckily, was
+something else!"
+
+"Does there always have to be a fire?" asked Ruth, laughing.
+
+"Wait and see," repeated Barbara. "Perhaps you'll have an earthquake."
+
+We have time for talks. We take up every little chink of time to have
+each other in. We want each other in all sorts of ways; we never
+wanted each other so, or _had_ each other so, before.
+
+Delia Waite is here, and there is some needful stitching going on; but
+the minutes are alongside the stitches, they are not eaten up; there
+are minutes everywhere. We have got a great deal of life into a little
+while; and--we have finished up our Home Story, to the very present
+instant.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Who finishes it? Who tells it?
+
+Well,--"the kettle began it." Mrs. Peerybingle--pretty much--finished
+it. That is, the story began itself, then Ruth discovered that it was
+beginning, and began, first, to put it down. Then Ruth grew busy, and
+she wouldn't always have told quite enough of the Ruthy part; and Mrs.
+Holabird got hold of it, as she gets hold of everything, and she would
+not let it suffer a "solution of continuity." Then, partly, she
+observed; and partly we told tales, and recollected and reminded; and
+partly, here and there, we rushed in,--especially I, Barbara,--and did
+little bits ourselves; and so it came to be a "Song o' Sixpence," and
+at least four Holabirds were "singing in the pie."
+
+Do you think it is--sarcastically--a "pretty dish to set before the
+king"? Have we shown up our friends and neighbors too plainly? There
+is one comfort; nobody knows exactly where "Z----" is; and there are
+friends and neighbors everywhere.
+
+I am sure nobody can complain, if I don't. This last part--the
+Barbarous part--is a continual breach of confidence. I have a great
+mind, now, not to respect anything myself; not even that cadet button,
+made into a pin, which Ruth wears so shyly. To be sure, Mrs. Hautayne
+has one too; she and Ruth are the only two girls whom Dakie Thayne
+considers _worth_ a button; but Leslie is an old, old friend; older
+than Dakie in years, so that it could never have been like Ruth with
+her; and she never was a bit shy about it either. Besides--
+
+Well, you cannot have any more than there is. The story is told as far
+as we--or anybody--has gone. You must let the world go round the sun
+again, a time or two; everything has not come to pass yet--even with
+"We Girls."
+
+
+THE END.
+
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+End of Project Gutenberg's We Girls: A Home Story, by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12224 ***