"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 ap.r.o.n, 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 sc.r.a.ps 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 b.u.t.tons.
"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?
[Ill.u.s.tration]
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 b.u.mp 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, un.o.btrusive 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 st.i.tches 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 Mitch.e.l.la, 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 sh.e.l.ls, 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 bas.e.m.e.nt, 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.