Mrs. Ripwinkley came down from the country with a bonnet on that had a crown, and with not a particle of a chignon.  When she was married, twenty-five years before, she wore a French twist,—­her hair turned up in waves from her neck as prettily as it did away from her forehead,—­and two thick coiled loops were knotted and fastened gracefully at the top.  She had kept on twisting her hair so, all these years; and the rippling folds turned naturally under her fingers into their places.  The color was bright still, and it had not thinned.  Over her brows it parted richly, with no fuzz or crimp; but a sweet natural wreathing look that made her face young.  Mrs. Ledwith had done hers over slate-pencils till she had burned it off; and now tied on a friz, that came low down, for fashion’s sake, and left visible only a little bunch of puckers between her eyebrows and the crowsfeet at the corners.  The back of her head was weighted down by an immense excrescence in a bag.  Behind her ears were bare places.  Mrs. Ledwith began to look old-young.  And a woman cannot get into a worse stage of looks than that.  Still, she was a showy woman—­a good exponent of the reigning style; and she was handsome—­she and her millinery—­of an evening, or in the street.

When I began that last paragraph I meant to tell you what else Mrs. Ripwinkley brought with her, down out of the country and the old times; but hair takes up a deal of room.  She brought down all her dear old furniture.  That is, it came after her in boxes, when she had made up her mind to take the Aspen Street house.

“Why, that’s the sofa Oliver used to lie down on when he came home tired from his patients, and that’s the rocking-chair I nursed my babies in; and this is the old oak table we’ve sat round three times a day, the family of us growing and thinning, as the time went on, all through these years.  It’s like a communion table, now, Laura.  Of course such things had to come.”

This was what she answered, when Laura ejaculated her amazement at her having brought “old Homesworth truck” to Boston.

“You see it isn’t the walls that make the home; we can go away from them and not break our hearts, so long as our own goes with us.  The little things that we have used, and that have grown around us with our living,—­they are all of living that we can handle and hold on to; and if I went to Spitzbergen, I should take as many of them as I could.”

The Aspen Street house just suited Mrs. Ripwinkley, and Diana, and Hazel.

In the first place, it was wooden; built side to the street, so that you went up a little paved walk, in a shade of trees, to get to the door; and then the yard, on the right hand side as you came in, was laid out in narrow walks between borders of blossoming plants.  There were vines against the brick end of the next building,—­creepers and morning-glories, and white and scarlet runners; and a little martin-box was set upon a pole in the still, farther corner.