To be sure if any one had told Di so, she would have flouted the very idea.  Besides, she had privately informed Almira Sisson, her special particular confidante, that she knew Jim would come home from college full of conceit, and thinking that everybody must bow down to him, and for her part she meant to make him know his place.  Of course Jim and she were good friends, etc., etc.

Oh, Di, Di! you silly, naughty girl, was it for this that you stood so long at your looking-glass last night, arranging how you would do your hair for the Thanksgiving night dance?  Those killing bows which you deliberately fabricated and lodged like bright butterflies among the dark waves of your hair—­who were you thinking of as you made and posed them?  Lay your hand on your heart and say who to you has ever seemed the best, the truest, the bravest and kindest of your friends.  But Di doesn’t trouble herself with such thoughts—­she only cuts out saucy mottoes from the flaky white paste to lay on the red cranberry tarts, of which she makes a special one for each cousin.  For there is Bill, the second eldest, who stays at home and helps work the farm.  She knows that Bill worships her very shoe-tie, and obeys all her mandates with the faithful docility of a good Newfoundland dog, and Di says “she thinks everything of Bill—­she likes Bill.”  So she does Ed, who comes a year or two behind Bill, and is trembling out of bashful boyhood.  So she does Rob and Ike and Pete and the whole healthy, ramping train who fill the Pitkin farm-house with a racket of boots and boys.  So she has made every one a tart with his initial on it and a saucy motto or two, “just to keep them from being conceited, you know.”

All day she keeps busy by the side of the deacon’s wife—­a delicate, thin, quiet little woman, with great thoughtful eyes and a step like a snowflake.  New England had of old times, and has still, perhaps, in her farm-houses, these women who seem from year to year to develop in the spiritual sphere as the bodily form shrinks and fades.  While the cheek grows thin and the form spare, the will-power grows daily stronger; though the outer man perish, the inner man is renewed day by day.  The worn hand that seems so weak yet holds every thread and controls every movement of the most complex family life, and wonders are daily accomplished by the presence of a woman who seems little more than a spirit.  The New England wife-mother was the one little jeweled pivot on which all the wheel work of the family moved.

“Well, haven’t we done a good day’s work, cousin?” says Diana, when ninety pies of every ilk—­quince, apple, cranberry, pumpkin, and mince—­ have been all safely delivered from the oven and carried up into the great vacant chamber, where, ranged in rows and frozen solid, they are to last over New Year’s day!  She adds, demonstratively clasping the little woman round the neck and leaning her bright cheek against her whitening hair, “Haven’t we been smart?” And the calm, thoughtful eyes turn lovingly upon her as Mary Pitkin puts her arm round her and answers: