They live in an old house that is just like them.  It has not a new-fashioned thing about it.  The walls are square, plain brick, painted gray; and there is a low, broad porch in front, and then terraces, flagged with gray stone and bordered with flower-beds at each side and below.  They have peacocks and guinea-hens, and more roses and lilies and larkspurs and foxgloves and narcissus than flowers of any newer sort; and there are great bushes of box and southernwood, that smell sweet as you go by.

Old General Pennington had been in the army all his life.  He was a captain at Lundy’s Lane, and got a wound there which gave him a stiff elbow ever after; and his oldest son was killed in Mexico, just after he had been brevetted Major.  There is a Major Pennington now,—­the younger brother,—­out at Fort Vancouver; and he is Pen’s father.  When her mother died, away out there, he had to send her home.  The Penningtons are just as proud as the stars and stripes themselves; and their glory is off the selfsame piece.

They made very much of Dakie Thayne when he was here, in their quiet, retired way; and they had always been polite and cordial to the Inglesides.

One morning, a little while after our party, mother was making an apple-pudding for dinner, when Madam Pennington and Miss Elizabeth drove round to the door.

Ruth was out at her lessons; Barbara was busy helping Mrs. Holabird.  Rosamond went to the door, and let them into the brown room.

“Mother will be sorry to keep you waiting, but she will come directly.  She is just in the middle of an apple-pudding.”

Rosamond said it with as much simple grace of pride as if she had had to say, “Mother is busy at her modelling, and cannot leave her clay till she has damped and covered it.”  Her nice perception went to the very farther-most; it discerned the real best to be made of things, the best that was ready made, and put that forth.

“And I know,” said Madam Pennington, “that an apple-pudding must not be left in the middle.  I wonder if she would let an old woman who has lived in barracks come to her where she is?”

Rosamond’s tact was superlative.  She did not say, “I will go and see”; she got right up and said, “I am sure she will; please come this way,” and opened the door, with a sublime confidence, full and without warning, upon the scene of operations.

“O, how nice!” said Miss Elizabeth; and Madam Pennington walked forward into the sunshine, holding her hand out to Mrs. Holabird, and smiling all the way from her smooth old forehead down to the “seventh beauty” of her dimple-cleft and placid chin.

“Why, this is really coming to see people!” she said.

Mrs. Holabird’s white hand did not even want dusting; she just laid down the bright little chopper with which she was reducing her flour and butter to a golden powder, and took Madam Pennington’s nicely gloved fingers into her own, without a breath of apology.  Apology!  It was very meek of her not to look at all set up.