We Girls, Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney [100 best novels of all time .txt] 📗

Aaron Goldthwaite's ward. I do not believe we have ever thought to put this in before.]

Otherwise, for two or three weeks, our chief variety was in sending for old Miss Trixie Spring to spend the day.

Miss Trixie Spring is a lively old lady, who, some threescore and five years ago, was christened "Beatrix." She plays backgammon in the twilights, with mother, and makes a table at whist, at once lively and severe, in the evenings, for father. At this whist-table, Barbara usually is the fourth. Rosamond gets sleepy over it, and Ruth--Miss Trixie says--"plays like a ninkum."

We always wanted Miss Trixie, somehow, to complete comfort, when we were especially comfortable by ourselves; when we had something particularly good for dinner, or found ourselves set cheerily down for a long day at quiet work, with everything early-nice about us; or when we were going to make something "contrive-y," "Swiss-family-Robinson-ish," that got us all together over it, in the hilarity of enterprise and the zeal of acquisition. Miss Trixie could appreciate homely cleverness; darning of carpets and covering of old furniture; she could darn a carpet herself, so as almost to improve upon--certainly to supplant--the original pattern. Yet she always had a fresh amazement for all our performances, as if nothing notable had ever been done before, and a personal delight in every one of our improvements, as if they had been her own. "We're just as cosey as we can be, already,--it isn't that; but we want somebody to tell us how cosey we are. Let's get Miss Trixie to-day," says Barbara.

Once was when the new drugget went down, at last, in the dining-room. It was tan-color, bound with crimson,--covering three square yards; and mother nailed it down with brass-headed tacks, right after breakfast, one cool morning. Then Katty washed up the dark floor-margin, and the table had its crimson-striped cloth on, and mother brought down the brown stuff for the new sofa-cover, and the great bunch of crimson braid to bind that with, and we drew up our camp-chairs and crickets, and got ready to be busy and jolly, and to have a brand-new piece of furniture before night.

Barbara had made peach-dumpling for dinner, and of course Aunt Trixie was the last and crowning suggestion. It was not far to send, and she was not long in coming, with her second-best cap pinned up in a handkerchief, and her knitting-work and her spectacles in her bag.

The Marchbankses never made sofa-covers of brown waterproof, nor had Miss Trixies to spend the day. That was because they had no back-door to their house.

I suppose you think there are a good many people in our story. There are; when we think it up there are ever so many people that have to do with our story every day; but we don't mean to tell you all _their_ stories; so you can bear with the momentary introduction when you meet them in our brown room, or in our dining-room, of a morning, although we know very well also that passing introductions are going out of fashion.

We had Dakie Thayne's last visit that day, in the midst of the hammering and binding. Leslie and he came in with Ruth, when she came back from her hour with Reba Hadden. It was to bid us good by; his furlough was over, he was to return to West Point on Monday.

"Another two years' pull," he said. "Won't you all come to West Point next summer?"

"If we take the journey we think of," said Barbara, composedly,--"to the mountains and Montreal and Quebec; perhaps up the Saguenay; and then back, up Lake Champlain, and down the Hudson, on our way to Saratoga and Niagara. We might keep on to West Point first, and have a day or two there."

"Barbara," said mother, remonstratingly.

"Why? _Don't_ we think of it? I'm sure I do. I've thought of it till I'm almost tired of it. I don't much believe we shall come, after all, Mr. Thayne."

"We shall miss you very much," said Mrs. Holabird, covering Barbara's nonsense.

"Our summer has stopped right in the middle," said Barbara, determined to talk.

"I shall hear about you all," said Dakie Thayne. "There's to be a Westover column in Leslie's news. I wish--" and there the cadet stopped.

Mother looked up at him with a pleasant inquiry.

"I was going to say, I wish there might be a Westover correspondent, to put in just a word or two, sometimes; but then I was afraid that would be impertinent. When a fellow has only eight weeks in the year of living, Mrs. Holabird, and all the rest is drill, you don't know how he hangs on to those eight weeks,--and how they hang on to him afterwards."

Mother looked so motherly at him then!

"We shall not forget you--Dakie," she said, using his first name for the first time. "You shall have a message from us now and then."

Dakie said, "Thank you," in a tone that responded to her "Dakie."

We all knew he liked Mrs. Holabird ever so much. Homes and mothers are beautiful things to boys who have had to do without them.

He shook hands with us all round, when he got up to go. He shook hands also with our old friend, Miss Trixie, whom he had never happened to see before. Then Rosamond went out with him and Leslie,--as it was our cordial, countrified fashion for somebody to do,--through the hall to the door. Ruth went as far as the stairs, on her way to her room to take off her things. She stood there, up two steps, as they were leaving.

Dakie Thayne said good by again to Rosamond, at the door, as was natural; and then he came quite back, and said it last of all, once more, to little Ruth upon the stairs. He certainly did hate to go away and leave us all.

"That is a very remarkable pretty-behaved young man," said Miss Trixie, when we all picked up our breadths of waterproof, and got in behind them again.

"The world is a desert, and the sand has got into my eyes," said Barbara, who had hushed up ever since mother had said "Dakie." When anybody came close to mother, Barbara was touched. I think her love for mother is more like a son's than a daughter's, in the sort of chivalry it has with it.

* * * * *

It was curious how suddenly our little accession of social importance had come on, and wonderful how quickly it had subsided; more curious and wonderful still, how entirely it seemed to stay subsided.

We had plenty to do, though; we did not miss anything; only we had quite taken up with another set of things. This was the way it was with us; we had things we _must_ take up; we could not have spared time to lead society for a long while together.

Aunt Roderick claimed us, too, in our leisure hours, just then; she had a niece come to stay with her; and we had to go over to the "old house" and spend afternoons, and ask Aunt Roderick and Miss Bragdowne in to tea with us. Aunt Roderick always expected this sort of attention; and yet she had a way with her as if we ought not to try to afford things, looked scrutinizingly at the quality of our cake and preserves, and seemed to eat our bread and butter with consideration.

It helped Rosamond very much, though, over the transition. We, also, had had private occupation.

"There had been family company at grandfather's," she told Jeannie Hadden, one morning. "We had been very much engaged among ourselves. We had hardly seen anything of the other girls for two or three weeks."

Barbara sat at the round table, where Stephen had been doing his geometry last night, twirling a pair of pencil compasses about on a sheet of paper, while this was saying. She lifted up her eyes a little, cornerwise, without moving her head, and gave a twinkle of mischief over at mother and Ruth. When Jeannie was gone, she kept on silently, a few minutes, with her diagrams. Then she said, in her funniest, repressed way,--

"I can see a little how it must be; but I suppose I ought to understand the differential calculus to compute it. Circles are wonderful things; and the science of curves holds almost everything. Rose, when do you think we shall get round again?"

She held up her bit of paper as she spoke, scrawled over with intersecting circles and arcs and ellipses, against whose curves and circumferences she had written names: Marchbanks, Hadden, Goldthwaite, Holabird.

"It's a mere question of centre and radius," she said. "You may be big enough to take in the whole of them, or you may only cut in at the sides. You may be just tangent for a minute, and then go off into space on your own account. You may have your centre barely inside of a great ring, and yet reach pretty well out of it for a good part; you _must_ be small to be taken quite in by anybody's!"

"It doesn't illustrate," said Rose, coolly. "Orbits don't snarl up in that fashion."

"Geometry does," said Barbara. "I told you I couldn't work it all out. But I suppose there's a Q.E.D. at the end of it somewhere."

* * * * *

Two or three days after something new happened; an old thing happened freshly, rather,--which also had to do with our orbit and its eccentricities. Barbara, as usual, discovered and announced it.

"I should think _any_ kind of an astronomer might be mad!" she exclaimed. "Periods and distances are bad enough; but then come the perturbations! Here's one. We're used to it, to be sure; but we never know exactly where it may come in. The girl we live with has formed other views for herself, and is going off at a tangent. What _is_ the reason we can't keep a satellite,--planet, I mean?"

"Barbara!" said mother, anxiously, "don't be absurd!"

"Well, what shall I be? We're all out of a place again." And she sat down resignedly on a very low cricket, in the middle of the room.

"I'll tell you what we'll do, mother," said Ruth, coming round. "I've thought of it this good while. We'll co-operate!"

"She's glad of it! She's been waiting for a chance! I believe she put the luminary up to it! Ruth, you're a brick--moon!"


CHAPTER VI.

CO-OPERATING.

When mother first read that article in the Atlantic she had said, right off,--

"I'm sure I wish they would!"

"Would what, mother?" asked Barbara.

"Co-operate."

"O mother! I really do believe you must belong, somehow, to the Micawber family! I shouldn't wonder if one of these days, when they come into their luck, you should hear of something greatly to your advantage, from over the water. You have such faith in 'they'! I don't believe '_they_' will ever do much for '_us_'!"

"What is it, dear?" asked Mrs. Hobart, rousing from a little arm-chair wink, during which Mrs. Holabird had taken up the magazine.

Mrs. Hobart had