She only thanked Adelaide, and said she “didn’t know,—­perhaps; but she hardly thought she could to-night; they had better not expect her,” and got away without promising.  She was thinking it over now.

She did not want to be stiff and disobliging; and she would like to hear Mrs. Van Alstyne sing.  If it were only for herself, she would very likely think it a reasonable “quid pro quo,” and modestly acknowledge that she had no claim to absolutely gratuitous compliment.  She would remember higher reason, also, than the quid pro quo; she would try to be glad in this little special “gift of ministering”; but it puzzled her about the others.  How would they feel about it?  Would they like it, her being asked so?  Would they think she ought to go?  And what if she were to get into this way of being asked alone?—­she the very youngest; not “in society” yet even as much as Rose and Barbara; though Barbara said they “never ‘came’ out,—­they just leaked out.”

That was it; that would not do; she must not leak out, away from them, with her little waltz ripples; if there were any small help or power of hers that could be counted in to make them all more valued, she would not take it from the family fund and let it be counted alone to her sole credit.  It must go with theirs.  It was little enough that she could repay into the household that had given itself to her like a born home.

She thought she would not even ask Mrs. Holabird anything about it, as at first she meant to do.

But Mrs. Holabird had a way of coming right into things.  “We girls” means Mrs. Holabird as much as anybody.  It was always “we girls” in her heart, since girls’ mothers never can quite lose the girl out of themselves; it only multiplies, and the “everlasting nominative” turns into a plural.

Ruth still sat in her white chair, with her cheek on her hand and her elbow on the window-ledge, looking out across the pleasant swell of grass to where they were cutting the first hay in old Mr. Holabird’s five-acre field, the click of the mowing-machine sounding like some new, gigantic kind of grasshopper, chirping its tremendous laziness upon the lazy air, when mother came in from the front hall, through her own room and saw her there.

Mrs. Holabird never came through the rooms without a fresh thrill of pleasantness.  Her home had expressed itself here, as it had never done anywhere else.  There was something in the fair, open, sunshiny roominess and cosey connection of these apartments, hers and her daughters’, in harmony with the largeness and cheeriness and clearness in which her love and her wish for them held them always.

It was more glad than grand; and she aimed at no grandness; but the generous space was almost splendid in its effect, as you looked through, especially to her who had lived and contrived in a “spy-glass house” so long.