It was such a thing as had never rolled up, or branched out, though, in Westover before.  The Marchbankses did not know what to make of it.  People got in who had never belonged.  There they were, though, in the stately old Pennington house, that was never thrown open for nothing; and when they were once there you really could not tell the difference; unless, indeed, it were that the old, middle wood was the deadest, just as it is in the trees; and that the life was in the new sap and the green rind.

Lucilla Waters invented charades; and Helen Josselyn acted them, as charades had never been acted on West Hill until now.  When it came to the Hobarts’ “Next Thursday” they gave us “Dissolving Views,”—­every successive queer fashion that had come up resplendent and gone down grotesque in these last thirty years.  Mrs. Hobart had no end of old relics,—­bandbaskets packed full of venerable bonnets, that in their close gradation of change seemed like one individual Indur passing through a metempsychosis of millinery; nests of old hats that were odder than the bonnets; swallow-tailed coats; broad-skirted blue ones with brass buttons; baby waists and basquines; leg-of-mutton sleeves, balloons, and military; collars inch-wide and collars ell-wide with ruffles rayonnantes; gathers and gores, tunnel-skirts, and barrel-skirts and paniers.  She made monstrous paper dickeys, and high black stocks, and great bundling neckcloths; the very pocket-handkerchiefs were as ridiculous as anything, from the waiter-napkin size of good stout cambric to a quarter-dollar bit of a middle with a cataract of “chandelier” lace about it.  She could tell everybody how to do their hair, from “flat curls” and “scallops” down or up to frizzes and chignons; and after we had all filed in slowly, one by one, and filled up the room, I don’t think there ever could have been a funnier evening!

We had musical nights, and readings.  We had a “Mutual Friend” Thursday; that was Mrs. Ingleside’s.  Rosamond was the Boofer Lady; Barbara was Lavvy the Irrepressible; and Miss Pennington herself was Mrs. Wilfer; Mr. and Mrs. Hobart were the Boffins; and Doctor Ingleside, with a wooden leg strapped on, dropped into poetry in the light of a friend; Maria Hendee came in twisting up her back hair, as Pleasant Riderhood,—­Maria Hendee’s back hair was splendid; Leslie looked very sweet and quiet as Lizzie Hexam, and she brought with her for her secondary that night the very, real little doll’s dressmaker herself,—­Maddy Freeman, who has carved brackets, and painted lovely book-racks and easels and vases and portfolios for almost everybody’s parlors, and yet never gets into them herself.

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