“You must draw the line somewhere,” people say.  “You cannot be acquainted with everybody.”

But Leslie’s lines are only radii.  They reach out to wherever there is a sympathy; they hold fast wherever they have once been joined.  Consequently, she moves to laws that seem erratic to those for whom a pair of compasses can lay down the limit.  Consequently, her wedding was “odd.”

If Olivia Marchbanks had been going to be married there would have been a “circle” invited.  Nobody would have been left out; nobody would have been let in.  She had lived in this necromantic ring; she would be married in it; she would die and be buried in it; and of all the wide, rich, beautiful champaign of life beyond,—­of all its noble heights, and hidden, tender hollows,—­its gracious harvest fields, and its deep, grand, forest glooms,—­she would be content, elegantly and exclusively, to know nothing.  To her wedding people might come, indeed, from a distance,—­geographically; but they would come out of a precisely corresponding little sphere in some other place, and fit right into this one, for the time being, with the most edifying sameness.

From the east and the west, the north and the south, they began to come, days beforehand,—­the people who could not let Leslie Goldthwaite be married without being there.  There were no proclamation cards issued, bearing in imposing characters the announcement of “Their Daughter’s Marriage,” by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron Goldthwaite, after the like of which one almost looks to see, and somewhat feels the need of, the regular final invocation,—­“God save the Commonwealth!”

There had been loving letters sent here and there; old Miss Craydocke, up in the mountains, got one, and came down a month earlier in consequence, and by the way of Boston.  She stayed there at Mrs. Frank Scherman’s; and Frank and his wife and little Sinsie, the baby,—­“she isn’t Original Sin, as I was,” says her mother,—­came up to Z——­ together, and stopped at the hotel.  Martha Josselyn came from New York, and stayed, of course, with the Inglesides.

Martha is a horrible thing, girls; how do you suppose I dare to put her in here as I do?  She is a milliner.  And this is how it happens.  Her father is a comparatively poor man,—­a book-keeper with a salary.  There are ever so many little Josselyns; and Martha has always felt bound to help.  She is not very likely to marry, and she is not one to take it into her calculation, if she were; but she is of the sort who are said to be “cut out for old maids,” and she knows it.  She could not teach music, nor keep a school, her own schooling—­not her education; God never lets that be cut short—­was abridged by the need of her at home.  But she could do anything in the world with scissors and needle; and she can make just the loveliest bonnets that ever were put together.