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.