Miss Euphrasia did.  Also, the old Miss Goodwyns, who lived up the Turn behind the maples, were privileged to offer Miss Kirkbright a cup of tea when she went in there, as she would often for an hour’s talk over knitting work and books that had been lent and read.  Sylvie might well enough do the same, or go to them for hints and helps in her window-gardening and little ingenuities of housekeeping.  Mrs. Argenter deluded herself agreeably with the notion that the relations in each case were identical.  But what with the Sherretts and Miss Kirkbright were mere kindly incidents of living, apart somewhat from the crowd of daily demand and absorption, were to Sylvie the essential resource and relaxation of a living that could find little other.

Sylvie let her mother’s reading pass, not knowing how far Mrs. Argenter was able actually to believe in it herself, but clearly and thankfully recognizing, on her own part the reality,—­that she had these friends and resources to brighten what would else be, after all, pretty hard to endure.

The Knoxwells and the Kents and old Mrs. Sunderline were hardly neighbors, as she had meant to neighbor with them.  The Knoxwells and the Kents were a little jealous and suspicious of her overtures, as she had said, and would not quite let her in.  Besides, she did not draw toward Marion Kent, who came to church with French gilt bracelets on, and a violently trimmed polonaise, as she did toward Dot and Ray.

Old Mrs. Sunderline was as nice and cosy as could be but she never went out herself, and her whole family consisted of herself, her sister,—­Aunt Lora, the tailoress,—­and her son, the young carpenter, whom Sylvie could not help discerning was much noted and discussed among the womenkind, old and young, as a village—­what shall I say, since I cannot call my honest, manly Frank Sunderline a village beau?  A village desirable he was, at any rate.  Of course, Sylvie Argenter could not go very much to his home, to make a voluntary intimacy.  And all these, if she and they had cared mutually ever so much, would hare been under Mrs. Argenter’s proscription as mere common work-and-trade people whom nobody knew beyond their vocations.  There was this essential difference between the baker’s daughters whom the Sherrett family noticed exceptionally and the blacksmith’s and carpenter’s households, the woman who “took in fine washing,” and her forward, dressy, ambitious girl.  Though the baker’s daughters and the good Miss Goodwyns themselves knew all these in their turn, quite well, and belonged among them.  The social “laying on of hands” does not hold out, like the apostolic benediction, all the way down.