Leslie would not have asked her to be Jennie Wren, because she really has a lame foot; but when they told her about it, she said right off, “O, how I wish I could be that!” She has not only the lame foot, but the wonderful “golden bower” of sunshiny hair too; and she knows the doll’s dressmaker by heart; she says she expects to find her some time, if ever she goes to England—­or to heaven.  Truly she was up to the “tricks and the manners” of the occasion; nobody entered into it with more self-abandonment than she; she was so completely Jennie Wren that no one—­at the moment—­thought of her in any other character, or remembered their rules of behaving according to the square of the distance.  She “took patterns” of Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks’s trimmings to her very face; she readied up behind Mrs. Linceford, and measured the festoon of her panier.  There was no reason why she should be afraid or abashed; Maddy Freeman is a little lady, only she is poor, and a genius.  She stepped right out of Dickens’s story, not into it, as the rest of us did; neither did she even seem to step consciously into the grand Pennington house; all she did as to that was to go “up here,” or “over there,” and “be dead,” as fresh, new-world delights attracted her.  Lizzie Hexam went too; they belonged together; and T’other Governor would insist on following after them, and being comfortably dead also, though Society was behind him, and the Veneerings and the Podsnaps looking on.  Mrs. Ingleside did not provide any Podsnaps or Veneerings; she said they would be there.

Now Eugene Wrayburn was Doctor John Hautayne; for this was only our fourth evening.  Nobody had anything to say about parts, except the person whose “next” it was; people had simply to take what they were helped to.

We began to be a little suspicious of Doctor Hautayne; to wonder about his “what next.”  Leslie behaved as if she had always known him; I believe it seemed to her as if she always had; some lives meet in a way like that.

It did not end with parties, Miss Pennington’s exogenous experiment.  She did not mean it should.  A great deal that was glad and comfortable came of it to many persons.  Miss Elizabeth asked Maddy Freeman to “come up and be dead” whenever she felt like it; she goes there every week now, to copy pictures, and get rare little bits for her designs out of the Penningtons’ great portfolios of engravings and drawings of ancient ornamentations; and half the time they keep her to luncheon or to tea.  Lucilla Waters knows them now as well as we do; and she is taking German lessons with Pen Pennington.

It really seems as if the “nexts” would grow on so that at last it would only be our old “set” that would be in any danger of getting left out.  “Society is like a coral island after all,” says Leslie Goldthwaite.  “It isn’t a rock of the Old Silurian.”

It was a memorable winter to us in many ways,—­that last winter of the nineteenth century’s seventh decade.