“Better than yours and mine, Del?” said Laura, demurely.

“Why, no,—­I suppose not so good.  But I was thinking more of the picture.”

“Oh!” said Laura.

I was on the point of asking what she thought of Knight’s Shakspeare, when the bell rang and Polly brought up Miss Russell’s card.

Miss Russell was good and pretty, with a peach-bloom complexion, soft blue eyes, and curling auburn hair.  Still those were articles that could not well be appraised, as I thought the first minute after we were seated in the parlor.  But she had over her shoulders a cashmere scarf, which Mr. Russell had brought from India himself, which was therefore a genuine article, and which, to crown all, cost him only fifty dollars.  It would readily bring thrice that sum in Boston, Miss Russell said.  But such chances were always occurring.  Then she described how the shawls were all thrown in a mess together in a room, and how the captains of vessels bought them at hap-hazard, without knowing anything about their value or their relative fineness, and how you could often, if you knew about the goods, get great bargains.  It was a good way to send out fifty or a hundred dollars by some captain you could trust for taste, or the captain’s wife.  But it was generally a mere chance.  Sometimes there would be bought a great old shawl that had been wound round the naked waist and shoulders of some Indian till it was all soiled and worn.  That would have to be cut up into little neck-scarfs.  But sometimes, too, you got them quite new.  Papa knew about dry goods, luckily, and selected a nice one.

Part of this was repulsive,—­but, again, part of it attractive.  We don’t expect to be the cheated ones ourselves.

The bell rang again, and this time Lieutenant Clarence Herbert entered on tiptoe:  not of expectation particularly, but he had a way of tiptoeing which had been the fashion before he went to sea the last time, and which he resumed on his return, without noticing that in the mean time the fashion had gone by, and everybody stood straight and square on his feet.  The effect, like all just-gone-by fashions, was to make him look ridiculous; and it required some self-control on our part to do him the justice of remembering that he could be quite brilliant when he pleased, was musical and sentimental.  He had a good name, as I sighed in recalling.

We talked on, and on, instinctively keeping near the ground, and hopping from bough to bough of daily facts.

When they were both gone, we rejoiced, and went up-stairs again to our work and our rocking.  Laura hummed,—­

  “’The visit paid, with ecstasy we come,
  As from a seven-years’ transportation, home,
  And there resume the unembarrassed brow,
  Recovering what we lost, we know not how,’—­

“What is it?—­

  “‘Expression,—­and the privilege of thought.’”

“What an idea Louisa Russell always gives one of clothes!” said Laura.  “I never remember the least thing she says.  I would almost as soon have in the house one of those wire-women they keep in the shops to hang shawls on, for anything she has to say.”