Mrs. Ripwinkley laughed, gently.

“It would require management with us to get rid of that, upon ourselves.”

“O, my dear, don’t I tell you continually, you haven’t waked up yet?  Just rub your eyes a while longer,—­or let the girls do it for you,—­and you’ll see!  Why, I know of girls,—­girls whose mothers have limited incomes, too,—­who have been kept plain, actually plain, all their school days, but who must have now six and eight hundred a year to go into society with.  And really I wouldn’t undertake it for less, myself, if I expected to keep up with everything.  But I must treat mine all alike, and we must be contented with what we have.  There’s Helena, now, crazy for a young party; but I couldn’t think of it.  Young parties are ten times worse than old ones; there’s really no end to the expense, with the German, and everything.  Helena will have to wait; and yet,—­of course, if I could, it is desirable, almost necessary; acquaintances begin in the school-room,—­society, indeed; and a great deal would depend upon it.  The truth is, you’re no sooner born, now-a-days, than you have to begin to keep up; or else—­you’re dropped out.”

“O, Laura! do you remember the dear little parties our mother used to make for us?  From four till half-past eight, with games, and tea at six, and the fathers looking in?”

“And cockles, and mottoes, and printed cambric dresses, and milk and water!  Where are the children, do you suppose, you dear old Frau Van Winkle, that would come to such a party now?”

“Children must be born simple, as they were then.  There’s nothing my girls would like better, even at their age, than to help at just such a party.  It is a dream of theirs.  Why shouldn’t somebody do it, just to show how good it is?”

“You can lead a horse to water, you know, Frank, but you can’t make him drink.  And the colts are forty times worse.  I believe you might get some of the mothers together for an ancient tea-drink, just in the name of old association; but the babies would all turn up their new-fashioned little noses.”

“O, dear!” sighed Frau Van Winkle.  “I wish I knew people!”

“By the time you do, you’ll know the reason why, and be like all the rest.”

Hazel Ripwinkley went to Mrs. Hilman’s school, with her cousin Helena.  That was because the school was a thoroughly good one; the best her mother could learn of; not because it was kept in parlors in Dorset Street, and there were girls there who came from palaces west of the Common, in the grand avenues and the ABC streets; nor did Hazel wear her best gray and black velvet suit for every day, though the rich colored poplins with their over-skirts and sashes, and the gay ribbons for hair and neck made the long green baize covered tables look like gardenplots with beds of bloom, and quite extinguished with their brilliancy the quiet, one skirted brown merino that she brushed and folded every night, and put on with fresh linen cuffs and collar every morning.