to him about getting off for a while to Rye, or Mount
Desert.

She came by and by to the end of her volume, and found that the
serial she was following ran on into the next.

"Provoking," she said, tossing it down to the end of the sofa, "and
neither Sylvie nor I can get into town in this heat, and Argie
thinks it such a bother to be asked to go to Loring's."

Just then Sylvie's step came lightly up the stairs. She looked into
the large cool dressing-room where her mother lay.

"I'm only up for my 'Confession Album'," she said. "But O Mater
Amata! if you'd just come down and help me through! I know they'd
stay to tea and go home in the cool, if I only knew how to ask them;
but if I said a word I should be sure to drive them away. _You_ can
do it; and they would if you came. Please do!"

"You silly child! Won't you ever be able to do anything yourself?
When you were a little girl, you wouldn't carry a message, because
you could get into a house, but didn't know how to get out! And now
you are grown up, you can get people into the house to see you, but
you don't know how to ask them to stay to tea! What _shall_ I ever
do with you?"

"I don't know. I'm awfully afraid of--_nice_ girls!"

"Sylvie, I'm ashamed of you! As if you had any other kind of
acquaintance, or weren't as nice as any of them! I wouldn't suggest
it, even to myself, if I were you."

"And I don't," said Sylvie boldly--"when I'm _by_ myself. But
there's a kind of a little misgiving somehow, when they come, or
when I go, as if--well, as if there _might_ be something to it that
I didn't know of, or behind it that I hadn't got; or else, that
there were things that they had nothing to do with that I know too
much of. A kind of a--Poggowantimoc feeling, mother! Amy Sherrett is
so _fearfully_ refined,--all the way through! It doesn't seem as if
she ever had any common things to say or do. Don't you think it
_takes_ common things to get people really near to each other? It
doesn't seem to me I could ever be intimate--or very easy--with Amy
Sherrett."

"You seemed to get on well enough with her brother, the other day."

"Boys aren't half so bad. There isn't any such wax-work about boys.
Besides,"--and Sylvie laughed a low, gay little laugh,--we got spilt
out together, you know."

"Well, don't stand talking. You mustn't keep them waiting. It isn't
time to speak about tea, yet. Look over the album, and get at some
music. _Keep_ them without saying anyth