The Ledwiths took apartments in Boston for a month. They packed away
the furniture they wanted to keep for upper rooms, in the attics of
their house at Z----. They had an auction of all the furniture of
their drawing-room, dining-room, library, and first floor of
sleeping-rooms. Then they were to let their house. Meanwhile, one
was to be fixed upon and fitted up in Boston. In all this Mrs.
Megilp advised, invaluably.
"It's of no use to move things," she said. "Three removes are as bad
as a fire; and nothing ever fits in to new places. Old wine and new
bottles, you know! Clear all off with a country auction. Everybody
comes, and they all fight for everything. Things bring more than
their original cost. Then you've nothing to do but order according
to your taste."
Mr. Oldways had invited both his nieces to his own house on their
arrival. But here again Mrs. Megilp advised,--so judiciously.
"There are too many of you; it would be a positive infliction. And
then you'll have all your running about and planning and calculating
to do, and the good old gentleman would think he had pulled half
Boston down about his ears. Your sister can go there; it would be
only generous and thoughtful to give way to her. There are only
three of them, and they are strange, you know, to every thing, and
wouldn't know which way to turn. I can put you in the way of rooms
at the Bellevue, exactly the thing, for a hundred and fifty a
month. No servants, you see; meals at the restaurant, and very good,
too. The Wedringtons are to give them up unexpectedly; going to
Europe; poor Mrs. Wedrington is so out of health. And about the
house; don't decide in a hurry; see what your uncle says, and your
sister. It's very likely she'll prefer the Aspen Street house; and
it _would_ be out of the way for you. Still it is not to be
_refused_, you know; of course it is very desirable in many
respects; roomy, old-fashioned, and a garden. I think your sister
will like those things; they're what she has been used to. If she
does, why it's all comfortably settled, and nobody refuses. It is so
ungracious to appear to object; a gift horse, you know."
"Not to be refused; only by no means to be taken; masterly
inactivity till somebody else is hooked; and then somebody else is
to be grateful for the preference. I wish Mrs. Megilp wouldn't shine
things up so; and that mother wouldn't go to her to black all her
boots!"
Desire said this in secret, indignant discomfort, to Helena, the
fourth in the family, her chum-sister. Helena did very well to talk
to; she heard anything; then she pranced round the room and chaffed
the canary.
"Chee! chee! chee! chiddle, iddle, iddle, iddle, e-e-ee! Where do
you keep all your noise and your breath? You're great, aren't you?
You do that to spite people that have to work up one note at a time.
You don't take it in away down under your belt, do you? You're not
particular about that. You don't know much, after all. You don't
know _how_ you do it. You aren't learning of Madame Caroletti. And
you haven't learned two quarters, any way. You were only just born
last spring. Set up! Tr-r-r-r-e-e-ee! I can do that myself. I don't
believe you've got an octave in you. Poh!"
Mrs. Ripwinkley came down from the country with a bonnet on that
had a crown, and with not a particle of a chignon. When she was
married, twenty-five years before, she wore a French twist,--her
hair turned up in waves from her neck as prettily as it did away
from her forehead,--and two thick coiled loops were knotted and
fastened gracefully at the top. She had kept on twisting her hair
so, all these years; and the rippling folds turned naturally under
her fingers into their places. The color was bright still, and it
had not thinned. Over her brows it parted richly, with no fuzz or
crimp; but a sweet natural wreathing look that made her face young.
Mrs. Ledwith had done hers over slate-pencils till she had burned it
off; and now tied on a friz, that came low down, for fashion's sake,
and left visible only a little bunch of puckers between her eyebrows
and the crowsfeet at the corners. The back of her head was weighted
down by an immense excrescence in a bag. Behind her ears were bare
places. Mrs. Ledwith began to look old-young. And a woman cannot get
into a worse stage of looks than that. Still, she was a showy
woman--a good exponent of the reigning style; and she was
handsome--she and her millinery--of an evening, or in the street.
When I began that last paragraph I meant to tell you what else Mrs.
Ripwinkley brought with her, down out of the country and the old
times; but hair takes up a deal of room. She brought down all her
dear old furniture. That is, it came after her in boxes, when she
had made up her mind to take the Aspen Street house.
"Why, that's the sofa Oliver used to lie down on when he came home
tired from his patients, and that's the rocking-chair I nursed my
babies in; and this is the old oak table we've sat round three times
a day, the family of us growing and thinning, as the time went on,
all through these years. It's like a communion table, now, Laura. Of
course such things had to come."
This was what she answered, when Laura ejaculated her amazement at
her having brought "old Homesworth truck" to Boston.
"You see it isn't the walls that make the home; we can go away from
them and not break our hearts, so long as our own goes with us. The
little things that we have used, and that have grown around us with
our living,--they are all of living that we can handle and hold on
to; and if I went to Spitzbergen, I should take as many of them as I
could."
The Aspen Street house just suited Mrs. Ripwinkley, and Diana, and
Hazel.
In the first place, it was wooden; built side to the street, so that
you went up a little paved walk, in a shade of trees, to get to the
door; and then the yard, on the right hand side as you came in, was
laid out in narrow walks between borders of blossoming plants. There
were vines against the brick end of the next building,--creepers and
morning-glories, and white and scarlet runners; and a little
martin-box was set upon a pole in the still, farther corner.
The rooms of the house were low, but large; and some of the windows
had twelve-paned sashes,--twenty-four to a window. Mrs. Ripwinkley
was charmed with these also. They were like the windows at Mile
Hill.
Mrs. Ledwith, although greatly relieved by her sister's prompt
decision for the house which she did _not_ want, felt it in her
conscience to remonstrate a little.
"You have just come down from the mountains, Frank, after your
twenty-five years' sleep; you've seen nothing by and by you will
think differently. This house is fearfully old-fashioned,
_fearfully_; and it's away down here on the wrong side of the hill.
You can never get up over Summit Street from here."
"We are used to hills, and walking."
"But I mean--that isn't all. There are other things you won't be
able to get over. You'll never shake off Aspen Street dust,--you nor
the children."
"I don't think it is dusty. It is quiet, and sheltered, and clean. I
like it ever so much," said Mrs. Ripwinkley.
"O, dear, you don't understand in the least! It's wicked to let you
go on so! You poor, dear, simple little old soul!"
"Never mind," said Mrs. Megilp. "It's all well enough for the
present. It pleases the old gentleman, you know; and after all he's
done, he ought to be pleased. One of you should certainly be in his
neighborhood. _He_ has been here from time immemorial; and any place
grows respectable by staying in it long enough--from _choice_.
Nobody will wonder at Mrs. Ripwinkley's coming here at his request.
And when she _does_ move, you see, she will know exactly what she is
about."
"I almost doubt if she ever _will_ know what she is about," said
Laura.
"In that case,--well,"--said Mrs. Megilp, and stopped, because it
really was not in the least needful to say more.
Mrs. Megilp felt it judicious, for many reasons, that Mrs.
Ripwinkley should he hidden away for awhile, to get that mountain
sleep out of her eyes, if it should prove possible; just as we rub
old metal with oil and put it by till the rust comes off.
The Ledwiths decided upon a house in Shubarton Place that would not
seem quite like taking old Uncle Titus's money and rushing away
with it as far as city limits would allow; and Laura really did wish
to have the comfort of her sister's society, in a cozy way, of
mornings, up in her room; that was her chief idea about it. There
were a good many times and things in which she scarcely expected
much companionship from Frank. She would not have said even to
herself, that Frank was rusty; and she would do her faithful and
good-natured best to rub her up; but there was an instinct with her
of the congruous and the incongruous; and she would not do her
Bath-brick polishing out on the public promenade.
They began by going together to the carpet stores and the paper
warehouses; but they ended in detailing themselves for separate
work; their ideas clashed ridiculously, and perpetually confused
each other. Frank remembered loyally her old brown sofa and chairs;
she would not have gay colors to put them out of countenance; for
even if she re-covered them, she said they should have the same old
homey complexion. So she chose a fair, soft buff, with a pattern of
brown leaves, for her parlor paper; Mrs. Ledwith, meanwhile,
plunging headlong into glories of crimson and garnet and gold.
Agatha had her blush pink, in panels, with heart-of-rose borders,
set on with delicate gilt beadings; you would have thought she was
going to put herself up, in a fancy-box, like a French _mouchoir_ or
a _bonbon_.
"Why _don't_ you put your old brown things all together in an
up-stairs room, and call it Mile Hill? You could keep it for old
times' sake, and sit there mornings; the house is big enough; and
then have furniture like other people's in the parlor?"
"You see it wouldn't be _me_." said Mrs. Ripwinkley, simply.
"They keep saying it 'looks,' and 'it looks,'" said Diana to her
mother, at home. "Why must everything _look_ somehow?"
"And every_body_, too," said Hazel. "Why, when we meet any one in
the street that Agatha and Florence know, the minute they have gone
by they say, 'She didn't look well to-day,' or, 'How pretty she did
look in that new hat!' And after the great party they went to at
that Miss Hitchler's, they never told a word about it except how
girls 'looked.' I wonder what they _did_, or where the good time
was. Seems to me people ain't living,--they are only just looking;
or _is_ this the same old Boston that you told about, and where are
the real folks, mother?"
"We shall find them," said Mrs. Ripwinkley, cheerily; "and the real
of these, too, when the outsides are settled. In the meantime, we'll
make our house say, and not look. Say something true, of course.
Things won't say anything else, you see; if you try to make them,
they don't speak out; they only stand in a dumb show and make
faces."
"That's looking!" said Hazel. "Now I know."
"How those children do grow!" said Mrs. Ripwinkley, as they went off
together. "Two months ago they were sitting out on the kitchen roof,
and coming to me to hear the old stories!"
"Transplantin'," said Luclarion. "That's done it."
At twelve and fourteen, Hazel and Diana could be simple as
birds,--simpler yet, as human children waiting for all things,--in
their country life and their little dreams of the world. Two months'
contact with people and things in a great city had started the life
that was in them, so that it showed what manner of growth it was to
be of.
And little Hazel Ripwinkley had got hold already of the small end of
a very large problem.
But she could not make it out that this was the same old Boston
that her mother had told about, or where the nice neighbors were
that would be likely to have little tea-parties for their children.