The Other Girls - Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney (free novels to read TXT) 📗

sides the great agitations of the day, which she felt instinctively were beginning wrong and foremost. "I _will_ work; I _will_ speak," cry the women. Very well; what hinders, if you have anything really to do, really to say? Opportunities are widening in the very nature and development of things; they are showing themselves at many a turn; but they give definite business, here and there; they quiet down those who take real hold. Outcry is no business; that is why the idle women take to it, and will do nothing else. It is not they who are moving the world forward to the clear sun-rising of the good day that must shine. People whose shoulders are at steady, small, unnoticed wheels are doing that.

Dot stayed in the house and helped her mother. She had a sewing-machine also, and she took in work from the neighbors, and from ladies like Miss Euphrasia Kirkbright, and Mrs. Greenleaf, and Mrs. Farland, who drove over to bring it from Roxeter, and East Mills, and River Point.

"Why don't you call and see me?" Sylvie Argenter asked one day, when she had walked over to the shop with a small basket, in which to put brown bread, little fine rolls for her mother, and some sugar cookies. Ray and Dot were both there. Dot was sitting with her sewing, putting in finishing stitches, button-holes, and the like. She was behind the counter, ready to mind the calls. Ray had come in to see what was wanting of fresh supplies from the bakehouse.

"I've been expecting you ever since we moved into the Turn. Ain't I to have any neighbors?"

The little court-way behind the Bank had come to be called the Turn; Sylvie took the name as she found it; as it named itself to her also in the first place, before she knew that others called it so. She liked it; it was one of those names that tell just what a thing is; that have made English nomenclature of places, in the old, original land above all, so quaint and full of pleasant home expression.

Dot looked up in surprise. It had never entered her head that the Argenters would expect them to call; and truly, the Argenters, in the plural, were very far indeed from any such imagination.

Ray took it more quietly and coolly.

"We are always very busy, since my father has been sick," she said. "We hardly go to see our old friends. But if you would like it, we will try and come, some day."

"I want you to," said Sylvie. "But I don't want you to _call_, though I said so. I want you to come right in and _see_ me. I never could bear calls, and I don't mean ever to begin with them again."

The Highfords had come and "called," in the carriage, with pearl-kid gloves and long-tailed carriage dresses; called in such a way that Sylvie knew they would probably never call again. It was a last shading off of the old acquaintance; a decent remembrance of them in their low estate, just not to be snobbish on the vulgar face of it; a visit that had sent her mother to bed with a mortified and exasperated headache, and taken away her slight appetite for the delicate little "tea" that Sylvie brought up to her on a tray.

The Ingrahams saw she really meant it, and they came in one evening at first, when they were walking by, and Sylvie sat alone, with a book, in the twilight, on the corner piazza. Her mother had been there; her easy-chair stood beside the open window, but she had gone in and lain down upon the sofa. Mrs. Argenter had drooped, physically, ever since the grief and change. It depends upon what one's life is, and where is the spring of it, and what it feeds upon, how one rallies from a shock of any sort. The ozone had been taken out of her atmosphere. There was nothing in all the sweet sunshine of generous days, or the rest of calm-brooding nights, to restore her, or to belong to her any more. She had nothing to breathe. She had nothing to grow to, or to put herself in rapport with. She was out of relation with all the great, full world.

"Whom did you have there?" she asked Sylvie, when Ray and Dot were gone, and she came in to see if her mother would like anything.

"The Ingrahams, mother; our neighbors, you know; they are nice girls; I like them. And they were very kind to me the day of my accident, you remember. I called first, you see! And besides," she added, loving the whole truth, "I told them the other morning I should like them to come."

"I don't suppose it makes any difference," Mrs. Argenter answered, listlessly, turning her head away upon the sofa cushion.

"It makes the difference, Amata," said Sylvie, with a bright gentleness, and touching her mother's pretty hair with a tender finger, "that I shall be a great deal happier and better to know such girls; people we have got to live amongst, and ought to live a little like. You can't think how pleasant it was to talk with them. All my life it has seemed as if I never really got hold of people."

"You certainly forget the Sherretts."

"No, I don't. But I never got hold of them much while I was just edging alongside. I think some people grasp hands the better for a little space to reach across. You mayn't be born quite in the purple, as Susan Nipper would say, but it isn't any reason you should try to pinch yourself black and blue. I've got all over it, and I like the russet a great deal better. I wish you could."

"I can't begin again," said Mrs. Argenter. "My life is torn up by the roots, and there is the end of it."

It was true. Sylvie felt that it was so, as her mother spoke, and she reproached herself for her own light content. How could her mother make intimacy with Mrs. Knoxwell, the old blacksmith's wife, or Mrs. Pevear, the carriage-painter's? Or even good, homely Mrs. Ingraham, over the bake-shop? It is so much easier for girls to come together; girls of this day, especially, who in all classes get so much more of the same things than their mothers did.

Sylvie, authorized by this feeble acquiescence in what made "no difference," went on with her intention of having Ray Ingraham for her intimate friend. She spent many an hour, as the summer wore away, at the time in the afternoon when Mrs. Argenter was always lying down, in the pleasant bedroom over the shop, that looked out under the elm-tree. This was Ray Ingraham's leisure also; the bread carts did not come in till tea time, with their returns and orders; the day's second baking was in the oven; she had an hour or two of quiet between the noon business and the night; then she was always glad to see Sylvie Argenter come down the street with her little purple straw work-basket swinging from her forefinger, or a book in her hand. Sylvie and Ray read new books together from the Dorbury library, and old ones from Mrs. Argenter's book-shelves. Dot was not so often with them; her leisure was given more to her flower beds, where all sorts of blooms,--bright petunias and verbenas, delicate sweet peas and golden lantanas, scarlet bouvardias and snowy deutzias, fairy, fragrant jessamines, white and crimson and rose-tinted fuchsias with their purple hearts, and pansies, poised on their light stems, in every rich color, like beautiful winged things half alighted in a great fluttering flock,--made a glory and a sweetness in the modest patch of ground between the grape-trellised wall of the house-end and the bricks of the bakery, against which grew, appropriately enough, some strings of hop vines.

"I think it is just the nicest place in the world," said Sylvie, in her girlish, unqualified speech, as they all stood there one evening, while Dot was cutting a bouquet for Sylvie's mother. "People that set out to have everything beautiful, get the same things over and over; graveled drives and a smooth lawn, and trees put into groups tidily, and circles and baskets of flowers, and a view, perhaps, of a village away off, or a piece of the harbor, or a peep at the hills. But you are right down _amongst_ such niceness! There's the river, close by; you can hear it all night, tumbling along behind the mills and the houses; there are the woods just down the lane beside the bakehouse; and here is the door-stone and the shady trellis, and the yard crowded full of flowers, as if they had all come because they wanted to, and knew they should have a good time, like a real country party, instead of standing off in separate properness, as people do who 'go into society.' And the new bread smells so sweet! I think it's what-for and because that make it so much better. Somebody came here to _do_ something; and the rest was, and happened, and grew. I can't bear things fixed up to be exquisite!"

"That is the real doctrine of the kingdom of heaven," said a sweet, cheery voice behind them. They all turned round; Miss Euphrasia Kirkbright stood upon the door-stone.

"Being and doing. Then the surrounding is born out of the living. The Lord, up there, lets the saints make their own glory."

"Then you don't think the golden streets are all paved hard, beforehand?" said Sylvie. She understood Miss Euphrasia, and chimed quickly into her key. She had had talks with her before this, and she liked them.

"No more than that," said Miss Kirkbright, pointing to the golden flush under the soft, piling clouds in the west, that showed in glimpses beneath the arches of the trees and across the openings behind the village buildings. "'New every morning, and fresh every evening.' Doesn't He show us how it is, every day's work that He himself begins and ends?"

"Do you think we shall ever live like that?" asked Ray Ingraham, perceiving.

"'Then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun, in the kingdom of their Father,'" repeated Miss Euphrasia. "And the shining of the sun makes his worlds around him, doesn't it? We shall create outside of us whatever is in us. We do it now, more than we know. We shall find it all, by and by, ready,--whatever we think we have missed; the building not made with hands."

"I'm afraid we shall find ourselves in queer places, some of us," said Dot. Dot had a way of putting little round, practical periods to things. She did not do it with intent to be smart, or epigrammatic. She simply announced her own most obvious conclusion.

"'The first last, and the last first.' That is a part of the same thing. The rich man and Lazarus; knowing as we are known; being clothed upon; unclothed and not found naked; the wedding garment. You cannot touch one link of spiritual fact, without drawing a whole chain after it. Some other time, laying hold somewhere else, the same sayings will be brought to mind again, to confirm the new thought. It is all alive, breathing; spirit in atoms, given to move and crystallize to whatever central magnetism, always showing some fresh phase of what is one and everlasting."

Miss Euphrasia could no more help talking so--given the right circumstances to draw her forth--than she could help breathing. Her whole nature was fluid to the truth, as the atoms she spoke of. Talking with