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

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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.

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