braids and two-dollar rats, or intricacies ready made up at the—­upholsterer’s, I was going to say.  So it is not a hopeless puzzle and an impracticable achievement to little Arctura Fish.  It is wonderful how nice she has made herself look lately, and how many little ways she puts on, just like Lucilla’s.  She hasn’t got beyond mere mechanical copying, yet; when she reaches to where Lucilla really is, she will take in differently.

Ruth gave up her little white room to Delia Waite, and went to sleep with Lucilla in the great, square east room.

Delia Waite thought a great deal of this; and it was wonderful how nobody could ever get a peep at the room when it looked as if anything in it had been used or touched.  Ruth is pretty nice about it; but she cannot keep it so sacredly fair and pure as Delia did for her.  Only one thing showed.

“I say,” said Stephen, one morning, sliding by Ruth on the stair-rail as they came down to breakfast, “do you look after that piousosity, now, mornings?”

“No,” said Ruth, laughing, “of course I can’t.”

“It’s always whopped,” said Stephen, sententiously.

Barbara got up some of her special cookery in these days.  Not her very finest, out of Miss Leslie; she said that was too much like the fox and the crane, when Lucilla asked for the receipts.  It wasn’t fair to give a taste of things that we ourselves could only have for very best, and send people home to wish for them.  But she made some of her “griddles trimmed with lace,” as only Barbara’s griddles were trimmed; the brown lightness running out at the edges into crisp filigree.  And another time it was the flaky spider-cake, turned just as it blushed golden-tawny over the coals; and then it was breakfast potato, beaten almost frothy with one white-of-egg, a pretty good bit of butter, a few spoonfuls of top-of-the-milk, and seasoned plentifully with salt, and delicately with pepper,—­the oven doing the rest, and turning it into a snowy souffle.

Barbara said we had none of us a specialty; she knew better; only hers was a very womanly and old-fashioned, not to say kitcheny one; and would be quite at a discount when the grand co-operative kitchens should come into play; for who cares to put one’s genius into the universal and indiscriminate mouth, or make potato-souffles to be carried half a mile to the table?

Barbara delighted to “make company” of seamstress week; “it was so nice,” she said, “to entertain somebody who thought ’chickings was ‘evingly.’”

Rosamond liked that part of it; she enjoyed giving pleasure no less than any; but she had a secret misgiving that we were being very vulgarly comfortable in an underhand way.  She would never, by any means, go off by herself to eat with her fingers.

Delia Waite said she never came to our house that she did not get some new ideas to carry home to Arabel.

Arabel Waite was fifty years old, or more; she was the oldest child of one marriage and Delia the youngest of another.  All the Waites between them had dropped away,—­out of the world, or into homes here and there of their own,—­and Arabel and Delia were left together in the square, low, gambrel-roofed house over on the other hill, where the town ran up small.