“You had better all come to us,” she said, graciously.  “It is a pity to divide.  We want the same people, of course,—­the Hendees, and the Haddens, and Leslie.”  She hardly attempted to disguise that we ourselves were an afterthought.

Rosamond told her, very sweetly, that we were obliged, but that she was afraid it was quite too late; we had asked others; the Hobarts, and the Inglesides; one or two whom Adelaide did not know,—­Helen Josselyn, and Lucilla Waters; the parties would not interfere much, after all.

Rosamond took up, as it were, a little sceptre of her own, from that moment.

Leslie Goldthwaite had been away for three days, staying with her friend, Mrs. Frank Scherman, in Boston.  She had found Olivia’s note, of Monday evening, when she returned; also, she heard of Rosamond’s verbal invitation.  Leslie was very bright about these things.  She saw in a moment how it had been.  Her mother told her what Rosamond had said of who were coming,—­the Hobarts and Helen; the rest were not then asked.

Olivia did not like it very well,—­that reply of Leslie’s.  She showed it to Jeannie Hadden; that was how we came to know of it.

“Please forgive me,” the note ran, “if I accept Rosamond’s invitation for the very reason that might seem to oblige me to decline it.  I see you have two days’ advantage of her, and she will no doubt lose some of the girls by that.  I really heard hers first.  I wish very much it were possible to have both pleasures.”

That was being terribly true and independent with West Z——.  “But Leslie Goldthwaite,” Barbara said, “always was as brave as a little bumble-bee!”

How it had come over Rosamond, though, we could not quite understand.  It was not pique, or rivalry; there was no excitement about it; it seemed to be a pure, spirited dignity of her own, which she all at once, quietly and of course, asserted.

Mother said something about it to her Saturday morning, when she was beating up Italian cream, and Rosamond was cutting chicken for the salad.  The cakes and the jellies had been made the day before.

“You have done this, Rosamond, in a very right and neighborly way, but it isn’t exactly your old way.  How came you not to mind?”

Rosamond did not discuss the matter; she only smiled and said, “I think, mother, I’m growing very proud and self-sufficient, since we’ve had real, through-and-through ways of our own.”

It was the difference between “somewhere” and “betwixt and between.”

Miss Elizabeth Pennington came in while we were putting candles in the bronze branches, and Ruth was laying an artistic fire in the wide chimney.  Ruth could make a picture with her crossed and balanced sticks, sloping the firm-built pile backward to the two great, solid logs behind,—­a picture which it only needed the touch of flame to finish and perfect.  Then the dazzling fire-wreaths curled and clasped through and about it all, filling the spaces with a rushing splendor, and reaching up their vivid spires above its compact body to an outline of complete live beauty.  Ruth’s fires satisfied you to look at:  and they never tumbled down.