The wide sashes were thrown up, and there were light chairs outside; Mrs. Holabird would give the guests tea and coffee, and Ruth and Barbara would sit in the window-seats and do the waiting, back and forth, and Dakie Thayne and Harry Goldthwaite would help.

Katty held her office as a sinecure that day; looked on admiringly, forgot half her regular work, felt as if she had somehow done wonders without realizing the process, and pronounced that it was “no throuble at ahl to have company.”

But before the tea was the new game.

It was a bold stroke for us Holabirds.  Originating was usually done higher up; as the Papal Council gives forth new spiritual inventions for the joyful acceptance of believers, who may by no means invent in their turn and offer to the Council.  One could hardly tell how it would fall out,—­whether the Haddens and the Marchbankses would take to it, or whether it would drop right there.

“They may ‘take it off your hands, my dear,’” suggested the remorseless Barbara.  Somebody had offered to do that once for Mrs. Holabird, when her husband had had an interest in a ship in the Baltic trade, and some furs had come home, richer than we had quite expected.

Rose was loftily silent; she would not have said that to her very self; but she had her little quiet instincts of holding on,—­through Harry Goldthwaite, chiefly; it was his novelty.

Does this seem very bare worldly scheming among young girls who should simply have been having a good time?  We should not tell you if we did not know; it begins right there among them, in just such things as these; and our day and our life are full of it.

The Marchbanks set had a way of taking things off people’s hands, as soon as they were proved worth while.  People like the Holabirds could not be taking this pains every day; making their cakes and their coffee, and setting their tea-table in their parlor; putting aside all that was shabby or inadequate, for a few special hours, and turning all the family resources upon a point, to serve an occasion.  But if anything new or bright were so produced that could be transplanted, it was so easy to receive it among the established and every-day elegances of a freer living, give it a wider introduction, and so adopt and repeat and centralize it that the originators should fairly forget they had ever begun it.  And why would not this be honor enough?  Invention must always pass over to the capital that can handle it.

The new game charmed them all.  The girls had the best of it, for the young men always gathered up the rings and brought them to each in turn.  It was very pretty to receive both hands full of the gayly wreathed and knotted hoops, to hold them slidden along one arm like garlands, to pass them lightly from hand to hand again, and to toss them one by one through the air with a motion of more or less inevitable grace; and the excitement of hope or of success grew with each succeeding trial.