“O Cousin Del!  I’m humiliated,—­disgusted!  I feel as small as butterflies’ pinfeathers!  I’ve been to see the Haddens.  Mrs. Linceford has just got home from Paris, and brought them wardrobes to last to remotest posterity!  And such things!  Such rufflings, and stitchings, and embroiderings!  Why, mine look—­as if they’d been made by the blacksmith!”

The “linen-drawer” was an institution of Mrs. Goldthwaite’s; resultant, partly, from her old-fashioned New England ideas of womanly industry and thrift,—­born and brought up, as she had been, in a family whose traditions were of house-linen sufficient for a lifetime spun and woven by girls before their twenty-first year, and whose inheritance, from mother to daughter, was invariably of heedfully stored personal and household plenishings, made of pure material that was worth the laying by, and carefully bleached and looked to year by year; partly, also, from a certain theory of wisdom which she had adopted, that when girls were once old enough to care for and pride themselves on a plentiful outfit, it was best they should have it as a natural prerogative of young-ladyhood, rather than that the “trousseau” should come to be, as she believed it so apt to be, one of the inciting temptations to heedless matrimony.  I have heard of a mother whose passion was for elegant old lace; and who boasted to her female friends that, when her little daughter was ten years old, she had her “lace-box,” with the beginning of her hoard in costly contributions from the stores of herself and of the child’s maiden aunts.  Mrs. Goldthwaite did a better and more sensible thing than this; when Leslie was fifteen, she presented her with pieces of beautiful linen and cotton and cambric, and bade her begin to make garments which should be in dozens, to be laid by, in reserve, as she completed them, until she had a well-filled bureau that should defend her from the necessity of what she called a “wretched living from hand to mouth,—­always having underclothing to make up, in the midst of all else that she would find to do and to learn.”

Leslie need not have been ashamed, and I don’t think in her heart she was, of the fresh, white, light-lying piles that had already begun to make promise of filling a drawer, which she drew out as she answered Cousin Delight’s question.

The fine-lined gathers; the tiny dots of stitches that held them to their delicate bindings; the hems and tucks, true to a thread, and dotted with the same fairy needle dimples (no machine-work, but all real, dainty finger-craft); the bits of ruffling peeping out from the folds, with their edges in almost invisible whip-hems; and here and there a finishing of lovely, lace-like crochet, done at odd minutes, and for “visiting work,”—­there was something prettier and more precious, really, in all this than in the imported fineries which had come, without labor and without thought, to her friends the Haddens.  Besides, there were the pleasant talks and readings of the winter