Dakie Thayne said good by again to Rosamond, at the door, as was natural; and then he came quite back, and said it last of all, once more, to little Ruth upon the stairs.  He certainly did hate to go away and leave us all.

“That is a very remarkable pretty-behaved young man,” said Miss Trixie, when we all picked up our breadths of waterproof, and got in behind them again.

“The world is a desert, and the sand has got into my eyes,” said Barbara, who had hushed up ever since mother had said “Dakie.”  When anybody came close to mother, Barbara was touched.  I think her love for mother is more like a son’s than a daughter’s, in the sort of chivalry it has with it.

* * * * *

It was curious how suddenly our little accession of social importance had come on, and wonderful how quickly it had subsided; more curious and wonderful still, how entirely it seemed to stay subsided.

We had plenty to do, though; we did not miss anything; only we had quite taken up with another set of things.  This was the way it was with us; we had things we must take up; we could not have spared time to lead society for a long while together.

Aunt Roderick claimed us, too, in our leisure hours, just then; she had a niece come to stay with her; and we had to go over to the “old house” and spend afternoons, and ask Aunt Roderick and Miss Bragdowne in to tea with us.  Aunt Roderick always expected this sort of attention; and yet she had a way with her as if we ought not to try to afford things, looked scrutinizingly at the quality of our cake and preserves, and seemed to eat our bread and butter with consideration.

It helped Rosamond very much, though, over the transition.  We, also, had had private occupation.

“There had been family company at grandfather’s,” she told Jeannie Hadden, one morning.  “We had been very much engaged among ourselves.  We had hardly seen anything of the other girls for two or three weeks.”

Barbara sat at the round table, where Stephen had been doing his geometry last night, twirling a pair of pencil compasses about on a sheet of paper, while this was saying.  She lifted up her eyes a little, cornerwise, without moving her head, and gave a twinkle of mischief over at mother and Ruth.  When Jeannie was gone, she kept on silently, a few minutes, with her diagrams.  Then she said, in her funniest, repressed way,—­

“I can see a little how it must be; but I suppose I ought to understand the differential calculus to compute it.  Circles are wonderful things; and the science of curves holds almost everything.  Rose, when do you think we shall get round again?”

She held up her bit of paper as she spoke, scrawled over with intersecting circles and arcs and ellipses, against whose curves and circumferences she had written names:  Marchbanks, Hadden, Goldthwaite, Holabird.

“It’s a mere question of centre and radius,” she said.  “You may be big enough to take in the whole of them, or you may only cut in at the sides.  You may be just tangent for a minute, and then go off into space on your own account.  You may have your centre barely inside of a great ring, and yet reach pretty well out of it for a good part; you must be small to be taken quite in by anybody’s!”