They could not help liking it, even the most fastidious; they might venture upon liking it, for it was a game with an origin and references.  It was an officers’ game, on board great naval ships; it had proper and sufficient antecedents.  It would do.

By the time they stopped playing in the twilight, and went up the wide end steps upon the deep, open platform, where coffee and biscuits began to be fragrant, Rosamond knew that her party was as nice as if it had been anybody’s else whoever; that they were all having as genuinely good a time as if they had not come “westover” to get it.

And everybody does like a delicious tea, such as is far more sure and very different from hands like Mrs. Holabird’s and her daughters, than from those of a city confectioner and the most professed of private cooks.

It all went off and ended in a glory,—­the glory of the sun pouring great backward floods of light and color all up to the summer zenith, and of the softly falling and changing shade, and the slow forth-coming of the stars:  and Ruth gave them music, and by and by they had a little German, out there on the long, wide esplanade.  It was the one magnificence of their house,—­this high, spacious terrace; Rosamond was thankful every day that Grandfather Holabird had to build the wood-house under it.

After this, Westover began to grow to be more of a centre than our home, cheery and full of girl-life as it was, had ever been able to become before.

They might have transplanted the game,—­they did take slips from it,—­and we might not always have had tickets to our own play; but they could not transplant Harry Goldthwaite and Dakie Thayne.  They would come over, nearly every day, at morning or evening, and practise “coil,” or make some other plan or errand; and so there came to be always something going on at the Holabirds’, and if the other girls wanted it, they had to come where it was.

Mrs. Van Alstyne came often; Rosamond grew very intimate with her.

Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks did say, one day, that she thought “the Holabirds were slightly mistaking their position”; but the remark did not come round, westover, till long afterward, and meanwhile the position remained the same.

It was right in the midst of all this that Ruth astonished the family again, one evening.

“I wish,” she said, suddenly, just as if she were not suggesting something utterly incongruous and disastrous, “that we could ask Lucilla Waters up here for a little visit.”

The girls had a way, in Z——­, of spending two or three days together at each other’s houses, neighbors though they were, within easy reach, and seeing each other almost constantly.  Leslie Goldthwaite came up to the Haddens’, or they went down to the Goldthwaites’.  The Haddens would stay over night at the Marchbanks’, and on through the next day, and over night again.  There were, indeed, three recognized degrees of intimacy:  that which took tea,—­that which came in of a morning and stayed to lunch,—­and that which was kept over night without plan or ceremony.  It had never been very easy for us Holabirds to do such things without plan; of all things, nearly, in the world, it seemed to us sometimes beautiful and desirable to be able to live just so as that we might.