Dorris has all Ruth’s music scholars, and more; for there has never been anybody to replace Miss Robbyns, and there are many young girls in Z——­, and down here in East Square, who want good teaching and cannot go away to get it.  She has also the organ-playing in the new church.

She keeps her morning hours and her Saturdays to help Rosamond; for they are “cooeperating” here, in the new home; what was the use, else, of having cooeperated in the old?  Rosamond cannot bear to have any coarse, profane fingers laid upon her little household gods,—­her wedding-tins and her feather dusters,—­while the first gloss and freshness are on, at any rate; and with her dainty handling, the gloss is likely to last a long while.

Such neighbors, too, as the Waites and Waterses are!  How they helped in the fitting up, running in in odd half hours from their own nailing and placing, which they said could wait awhile, since they weren’t brides; and such real old times visiting as they have already between the houses; coming and taking right hold, with wiping up dinner plates as likely as not, if that is the thing in hand; picking up what is there, as easily as “the girls” used to help work out some last new pattern of crochet, or try over music, or sort worsteds for gorgeous affghans for the next great fair!

Miss Arabel is apt to come in after dinner, and have a dab at the plates; she knows she interrupts nothing then; and she “has never been used to sitting talking, with gloves on and a parasol in her lap.”  And now she has given up trying to make impossible biases, she has such a quantity of time!

It was the matter of receiving visits from her friends who did sit with their parasols in their laps, or who only expected to see the house, or look over wedding presents, that would be the greatest hindrance, Rosamond realized at once; that is, if she would let it; so she did just the funniest thing, perhaps, that ever a bride did do:  she set her door wide open from her pretty parlor, with its books and flowers and pictures and window-draperies of hanging vines, into the plain, cozy little kitchen, with its tin pans and bright new buckets and its Shaker chairs; and when she was busy there, asked her girl-friends right in, as she had used to take them up into her bedroom, if she were doing anything pretty or had something to show.

And they liked it, for the moment, at any rate; they could not help it; they thought it was lovely; a kind of bewitching little play at keeping house; though some of them went away and wondered, and said that Rosamond Holabird had quite changed all her way of living and her position; it was very splendid and strong-minded, they supposed; but they never should have thought it of her, and of course she could not keep it up.

“And the neighborhood!” was the cry.  “The rabble she has got, and is going to have, round her!  All planks and sand, and tubs of mortar, now; you have to half break your neck in getting up there; and when it is settled it will be—­such a frowze of common people!  Why the foreman of our factory has engaged a house, and Mrs. Haslam, who actually used to do up laces for mamma, has got another!”