“O, yes.  No; I haven’t got tired; but I don’t feel as if I had quite been it, yet.  I don’t think I am exactly that, or anything, now.  That is the worst of it.  People don’t understand.  They won’t take us in,—­all of them.  It’s just as hard to get into a village, if you weren’t born in it, as it is to get into upper-ten-dom.  Mrs. Knoxwell called, and looked round all the time with her nose up in a sort of a way,—­well, it was just like a dog sniffing round for something.  And she went off and told about mother’s poor, dear, old, black silk dress, that I made into a cool skirt and jacket for her.  ‘Some folks must be always set up in silk, she sposed.’  Everybody isn’t like the Ingrahams.”

“No garment of this life fits exactly.  There was only one seamless robe.  But we mustn’t take thought for raiment, you see.  The body is more.  And at last,—­somehow, sometime,—­we shall be all clothed perfectly—­with his righteousness.”

This was too swift and light in its spiritual touching and linking for Sylvie to follow.  She had to ask, as the disciples did, for a meaning.

“It isn’t clothes that I am thinking of, or that trouble me; or any outside.  And I know it isn’t actual clothes you mean.  Please tell me plainer, Miss Euphrasia.”

“I mean that I think He meant by ‘raiment,’ not clothes so much as life; what we put on or have put on to us; what each soul wears and moves in, to feel itself by and to be manifest; history, circumstance.  ’Raiment,’—­’garment,’—­the words always stand for this, beyond their temporary and technical sense.  ’He laid aside his garment,’—­He gave up his own life that He might have been living,—­to come and wash our feet!”

“And the people cast their garments before Him, when He rode into Jerusalem,” Sylvie said presently.

“Yes; that is the way He must come into his kingdom, and lead us with Him.  We are to give up our old ways, and the selfish things we lived in once, and not think about our own raiment any more.  He will give it to us, as He gives it to the lilies; and the glory of it will be something that we could not in any way spin for our selves.  And by and by it will come to be full and right, all through; we shall be clothed with his righteousness.  What is righteousness but rightness?”

“I thought it only meant goodness.  That we hadn’t any goodness of our own; that we mustn’t trust in it, you know?”

“But that his, by faith, is to cover us?  That is the old letter-doctrine, which men didn’t look through to see how graciously true it is, and how it gives them all things.  For it is things they want, all the time; realities, of experience and having.  They talk about an abstract ‘justification by faith,’ and struggle for an abstract experience; not seeing how good God is to tell them plainly that his ‘justifying’ is setting everything right for them, and round them, and in them: