“You see, I don’t think it would be a good plan to let them begin with me so.”

“You’re a very sagacious little Ruth,” said Mrs. Holabird, affectionately.  “And a very generous one.”

“No, indeed!” Ruth exclaimed at that.  “I believe I think it’s rather nice to settle that I can be contrary.  I don’t like to be pat-a-caked.”

She was glad, afterward, that Mrs. Holabird understood.

The next morning Elinor Hadden and Leslie Goldthwaite walked over, to ask the girls to go down into the wood-hollow to get azaleas.

Rosamond and Ruth went.  Barbara was busy:  she was more apt to be the busy one of a morning than Rosamond; not because Rosamond was not willing, but that when she was at leisure she looked as though she always had been and always expected to be; she would have on a cambric morning-dress, and a jimpsey bit of an apron, and a pair of little fancy slippers,—­(there was a secret about Rosamond’s slippers; she had half a dozen different ways of getting them up, with braiding, and beading, and scraps of cloth and velvet; and these tops would go on to any stray soles she could get hold of, that were more sole than body, in a way she only knew of;) and she would have the sitting-room at the last point of morning freshness,—­chairs and tables and books in the most charming relative positions, and every little leaf and flower in vase or basket just set as if it had so peeped up itself among the others, and all new-born to-day.  So it was her gift to be ready and to receive.  Barbara, if she really might have been dressed, would be as likely as not to be comfortable in a sack and skirt and her “points,”—­as she called her black prunella shoes, that were weak at the heels and going at the sides, and kept their original character only by these embellishments upon the instep,—­and to have dumped herself down on the broad lower stair in the hall, just behind the green blinds of the front entrance, with a chapter to finish in some irresistible book, or a pair of stockings to mend.

Rosamond was only thankful when she was behind the scenes and would stay there, not bouncing into the door-way from the dining-room, with unexpected little bobs, a cake-bowl in one hand and an egg-beater in the other, to get what she called “grabs of conversation.”

Of course she did not do this when the Marchbankses were there, or if Miss Pennington called; but she could not resist the Haddens and Leslie Goldthwaite; besides, “they did have to make their own cake, and why should they be ashamed of it?”

Rosamond would reply that “they did have to make their own beds, but they could not bring them down stairs for parlor work.”

“That was true, and reason why:  they just couldn’t; if they could, she would make up hers all over the house, just where there was the most fun.  She hated pretences, and being fine.”

Rosamond met the girls on the piazza to-day, when she saw them coming; for Barbara was particularly awful at this moment, with a skimmer and a very red face, doing raspberries; and she made them sit down there in the shaker chairs, while she ran to get her hat and boots, and to call Ruth; and the first thing Barbara saw of them was from the kitchen window, “slanting off” down over the croquet-ground toward the big trees.