and
every-day-ness too.

Sylvie sat silent after this, and looked at her, wondering, more
than she had wondered about the furniture. Thinking, "how many girls
there were in the world! All sorts--everywhere! What did they all
do, and find to care for?" These were not the "other" girls of whom
her mother had blandly said that she could show kindnesses by taking
them to drive. Those were such as Aggie Townsend, the navy captain's
widow's daughter,--nice, but poor; girls whom everybody noticed, of
course, but who hadn't it in their power to notice anybody. That
made such a difference! These were _otherer_ yet! And for all that
they were girls,--girls! Ever so much of young life, and glow, and
companionship, ever so much of dream, and hope, and possible story,
is in just that little plural of five letters. A company of girls!
Heaven only knows what there is _not_ represented, and suggested,
and foreshadowed there!

Sylvie Argenter, with all her nonsense, had a way of putting
herself, imaginatively, into other people's places. She used to tell
her mother, when she was a little child and said her hymns,--which
Mrs. Argenter, not having any very fresh, instant spiritual life, I
am afraid, out of which to feed her child, chose for her in dim
remembrance of what had been thought good for herself when she was
little,--that she "didn't know exactly as she _did_ 'thank the
goodness and the grace that on her birth had smiled.'" She "should
like pretty well to have been a little--Lapland girl with a sledge;
or--a Chinese; or--a kitchen girl; a little while, I mean!"

She had a way of intimacy with the servants which Mrs. Argenter
found it hard to check. She liked to get into Jane's room when she
was "doing herself up" of an afternoon, and look over her cheap
little treasures in her band-box and chest-drawer. She made especial
love to a carnelian heart, and a twisted gold ring with two clasped
hands on it.

"I think it's real nice to have only _two_ or _three_ things, and to
'clean yourself up,' and to have a 'Sunday out!'" she said.

Mrs. Argenter was anxiously alarmed at the child's low tastes. Yet
these were very practicably compatible with the alternations of
importance in being driven about in her father's barouche, taking
Aggie Townsend up on the road, and "setting her down at the small
gray house."

Sylvie thought, this afternoon, looking at Ray Ingraham, in her
striped lilac and white calico, with its plaited waist an