thing; she didn’t believe in notability itself, at all:  the more one was fool enough to know, the more one had to do, all one’s life long.  Providence always took care of the lame and the lazy; and, besides, those capable people never had contented minds.  They couldn’t keep servants:  their own fingers were always itching to do things better.  Her sister Effie was a lamentable instance.  She’d married a man,—­well, not very rich,—­and she had set out to learn and direct everything.  The consequence was, she was like Eve after the apple,—­she knew good and evil; and wasn’t the garden just a wilderness after that?  She never thought of it before, but she believed that was exactly what that old poem in Genesis was written for!”

How Miss Craydocke answered, with her gentle, tolerant common-sense, and right thought, and wide-awake brightness; how the Josselyns grew cordial and confident enough to confess that, with five little children in the house, there wasn’t a great necessity for laying up against a rainy day, and with stockings at a dollar and a half a pair, one was apt to get the nine stitches, or a pretty comfortable multiple of them, every Wednesday when the wash came in; and how these different kinds of lives, coming together with a friendly friction, found themselves not so uncongenial, or so incomprehensible to each other, after all,—­all this, in its detail of bright words, I cannot stop to tell you; it would take a good many summers to go through one like this so fully; but when the big bell rang for dinner, they all came down the ledge together, and Sue and Martha Josselyn, for the first time in four weeks, felt themselves fairly one with the current interest and life of the gay house in which they had been dwellers and yet only lookers-on.

Mrs. Thoresby, coming down to dinner, a few minutes late, with her daughters, and pausing—­as people always did at the Green Cottage, without knowing why—­to step from the foot of the stairway to the open piazza-door, and glance out before turning toward the dining-room, saw the ledge party just dividing itself into its two little streams, that were to head, respectively, for cottage and hotel.

“It is a wonder to me that Mrs. Linceford allows it!” was her comment.  “Just the odds and ends of all the company here.  And those girls, who might take whatever stand they pleased.”

“Miss Leslie always finds out the nicest people, and the best times, I think,” said Etty, who had dragged through but a dull morning behind the blinds of her mother’s window, puzzling over crochet,—­which she hated, because she said it was like everlastingly poking one’s finger after a sliver,—­and had caught now and then, over the still air, the laughter and bird-notes that came together from among the pines.  One of the Miss Haughtleys had sat with them; but that only “stiffened out the dullness,” as Etty had declared, the instant the young lady left them.

“Don’t be pert, Etty.  You don’t know what you want, or what is for your interest.  The Haddens were well enough, by themselves; but when it comes to Tom, Dick, and Harry!”