Part 5 (1/2)

”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 mult.i.tudinous,” she said, graciously.

”The mids.h.i.+pman'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 fas.h.i.+on 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 p.r.o.nounced them,--”exquisite.”