ing about it. When people
think every minute they are just going, is just when they are having
the very pleasantest time."

"I know it. But you'll come, won't you, and make it all right? Put
on something loose and cool; that lovely black lace jacket with the
violet lining, and your gray silk skirt. It won't take you a minute.
Your hair's perfectly sweet now." And Sylvie hurried away.

Mrs. Argenter came down, twenty minutes afterwards, into the great
summer drawing-room, where the finest Indian matting, and dark, rich
Persian rugs, and inner window blinds folded behind lace curtains
that fell like the foam of waterfalls from ceiling to floor, made a
pleasantness out of the very heat against which such furnishings
might be provided.

In her silken skirt of silver gray, and the llama sack, violet
lined, to need no tight corsage beneath, her fair wrists and arms
showing white and cool in the wide drapery sleeves, she looked a
very lovely lady. Sylvie was proud of her handsome, elegant mother.
She grew a great deal braver always when Mrs. Argenter came in. She
borrowed a second consciousness from her in which she took courage,
assured that all was right. Chairs and rugs gave her no such
confidence, though she knew that the Sherretts themselves had no
more faultless surroundings. Anybody could have rugs and chairs. It
was the presence among them that was wanted; and poor Sylvie seemed
to herself to melt quite away, as it were, before such a girl as Amy
Sherrett, and not to be able to be a presence at all.

It was all right now, as Sylvie had said. They could not leave
immediately upon Mrs. Argenter joining them and her joining them was
of itself a welcome and an invitation. So Sylvie called upon her
mother to admire the lovely basket, wherein on damp, tender, bright
green moss, clustered the most exquisite blossoms, and the most
delicate trails of stem and leafage wandered and started up lightly,
and at last fell like a veil over rim and handle, and dropped below
the edge of the tiny round table with Siena marble top, on which
Sylvie had placed it between the curtains of the recess that led
through to their conservatory, which had been "a failure this year."

"I would not tell you of it, Amata. I wanted you just to see it,"
she said. And Mrs. Argenter admired and thanked, and then lamented
their own ill-success in greenhouse and garden culture.

"I am not strong enough to look after it much myself, and Mr.
Argenter n