Part 32 (1/2)
But the Ledwiths made a strong party; and they lived close by; there were plans continually.
Since Leslie Goldthwaite and Barbara Holabird were married and gone, and the Roger Marchbankses were burned out, and had been living in the city and travelling, the Hobarts and the Haddens and Ruth and Rosamond and Pen Pennington had kept less to their immediate Westover neighborhood than ever; and had come down to Lucilla's, and to Maddy Freeman's, and the Inglesides, as often as they had induced them to go up to the Hill.
Maud Marchbanks and the Hendees were civil and neighborly enough at home, but they did not care to ”ramify.” So it came to pa.s.s that they were left a good deal to themselves. Olivia and Adelaide, when they came up to Westover, to their uncle's, wondered ”that papa cared to build again; there really wasn't anything to come for; West Hill was entirely changed.”
So it was; and a very good thing.
I came across the other day, reading over Mr. Kingsley's ”Two Years Ago,” a true word as to social needs in England, that reminded me of this that the Holabirds and the Penningtons and the Inglesides have been doing, half unconsciously, led on from ”next” to next, in Z----.
Mr. Kingsley, after describing a Miss Heale, and others of her cla.s.s,--the middle cla.s.s, with no high social opportunities, and with time upon their hands, wasted often in false dreams of life and unsatisfied expectations, ”bewildering heart and brain with novels,”
for want of a n.o.bler companions.h.i.+p, says this: ”Till in country villages, the ladies who interest themselves about the poor will recollect that the farmers' and tradesmens' daughters are just as much in want of their influence as the charity children and will yield a far richer return for their labor, so long will England be full of Miss Heales.”
If a kindly influence and fellows.h.i.+p are the duty of the aristocratic girls of England toward their ”next,” below, how far more false are American girls to the spirit of their country, and the blessed opportunities of republican sympathies and equalities, when they try to draw invisible lines between themselves and those whose outer station differs by but so little, and whose hearts and minds, under the like culture with their own, crave, just as they do, the best that human intercourse can give. Social science has something to do, before--or at least simultaneously with--reaching down to the depths where all the wrongs and blunders and mismanagements of life have precipitated their foul residuum. A master of one of our public schools, speaking of the undue culture of the brain and imagination, in proportion to the opportunities offered socially for living out ideas thus crudely gathered, said that his brightest girls were the ones who in after years, impatient of the little life gave them to satisfy the capacities and demands aroused and developed during the brief period of school life, and fed afterwards by their own ill-judged and ill-regulated reading, were found fallen into lives of vice. Have our women, old or young, who make and circ.u.mscribe the opportunities of social intercourse and enjoyment, nothing to search out here, and help, as well, or as soon as, to get their names put on committee lists, and manage these public schools themselves, which educate and stimulate up to the point of possible fierce temptation, and then have nothing more that they can do?
It was a good thing for Desire Ledwith to grow intimate, as she did, with Rosamond Holabird. There were identical points of character between the two. They were both so real.
”You don't want to _play_ anything,” Barbara Holabird had said to Rosamond once, in some little discussion of social appearances and pretensions. ”And that's the beauty of you!”
It was the beauty of Desire Ledwith also; only, with Rosamond, her ambitions had clothed themselves with a grace and delicateness that would have their own perfect and thorough as far as it went; and with Desire, the same demands of true living had chafed into an impatience with shams and a blunt disregard of and resistance to all conventionalisms.
”You are a good deal alike, you two,” Kenneth Kincaid said to them one day, in a talk they all three happened to have together.
And he had told Rosamond afterward that there was ”something grand in Desire Ledwith; only grand things almost always have to grow with struggles.”
Rosamond had told this again to Desire.
It was not much wonder that she began to be happier; to have a hidden comfort of feeling that perhaps the ”waiting with all her might” was nearly over, and the ”by and by” was blossoming for her, though the green leaves of her own shy sternness with herself folded close down about the sweetening place, and she never parted them aside to see where the fragrance came from.
They were going to have a grand, large, beautiful supper party in the woods.
Mrs. Holabird and Mrs. Hobart were the matrons, and gave out the invitations.
”I don't think I could possibly spend a Tuesday afternoon with a little 't,'” said Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks laughing, and tossing down poor, dear, good Mrs. Hobart's note upon her table. ”It is _rather_ more than is to be expected!”
”Doctor and Mrs. Hautayne are here, and Dakie Thayne is home from West Point. It will be rather a nice party.”
”The Holabirds seem to have got everything into their own hands,”
said Mrs. Marchbanks, haughtily. ”It is always a pity when people take the lead who are not exactly qualified. Mrs. Holabird _will_ not discriminate!'
”I think the Holabirds are splendid,” spoke up Lily, ”and I don't think there's any fun in sticking up by ourselves! I can't bear to be judicious!”
Poor little Lily Marchbanks had been told a tiresome many times that she must be ”judicious” in her intimacies.
”You can be _pleasant_ to everybody,” said mother and elder sister, with a salvo of Christian benignity.
But it is so hard for little children to be pleasant with fence and limitation.
”Where must I stop?” Lily had asked in her simplicity. ”When they give me a piece of their luncheon, or when they walk home from school, or when they say they will come in a little while?”