CHAPTER VI.

THE PICNIC.

Gerald’s and Olly’s visit was quite an event in the quiet Lane household.  Olly flagrantly broke every existing custom in it with the sublime autocracy of childhood, and regained his health at the cost of the peace of mind of every individual with whom he came in contact, from nervous Miss Lydia down to the protesting servants; while Gerald was one of those intense personalities whose influence seems to recreate the entire atmosphere about them at once, go where they will.  Poor Miss Lydia was afraid of her quick speech and brusque ways and decided opinions, and spent more hours than usual upstairs alone in her own little room, and wore her best cap whenever she appeared below, as a sort of mute appeal to the young lady’s indulgence.  But Gerald, in her robust health, had no sympathy whatever with invalids as a class, and for “chronic nerves” she had an absolute contempt, unmitigated by even the best cap’s gay ribbons.  “It’s altogether a matter of will,” she asserted.  “People needn’t be ill if they are only resolved not to be so.”

“Humph!” said Mrs. Lane, who had chanced to overhear; and there was a trifle more tenderness than usual in her manner when she went up later to put the mid-day cup of beef-tea into her sister’s thin hands, and stood looking compassionately down at her.  “Nothing is easier than to insist that a thing is so and so, just because there’s no way to prove that it isn’t so.”

“How you do always talk in proverbs, Sister Sophy!” said Miss Lydia, admiringly.  “I only wish Solomon could have heard you.  I do believe he would have put some of them in.”

“He would have been far too busy taking down Mrs. Upjohn’s fine speeches to mind me,” grunted Mrs. Lane.  “And I never did think much of Solomon, anyway.  He was too much of a Mormon with his hundred wives and that.  Want any thing else, Lyddy?”

“No, thank you.  The house is very nice and still this morning.  There’s a picnic up at the Dexter’s farm, isn’t there?  I suppose they’ve all gone to it.”

“Of course.  Who ever heard of a picnic unless Phebe went along to do all the fussing and mussing that everybody else shirks?  Don’t tell me there’s any fun in a picnic,—­going off in the woods like that, to do for yourself what you’d sell the clothes off your back to have somebody else do for you at home, and eating all kinds of heathenish messes with your fingers because you’ve forgotten the forks.  But what people like let them have.  They’ll get experience out of it if nothing better.  And of course Phebe had to go.”