We Girls: A Home Story by Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney

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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?"

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