with
wiping up dinner plates as likely as not, if that is the thing in
hand; picking up what is there, as easily as "the girls" used to
help work out some last new pattern of crochet, or try over music,
or sort worsteds for gorgeous affghans for the next great fair!

Miss Arabel is apt to come in after dinner, and have a dab at the
plates; she knows she interrupts nothing then; and she "has never
been used to sitting talking, with gloves on and a parasol in her
lap." And now she has given up trying to make impossible biases, she
has such a quantity of time!

It was the matter of receiving visits from her friends who _did_ sit
with their parasols in their laps, or who only expected to see the
house, or look over wedding presents, that would be the greatest
hindrance, Rosamond realized at once; that is, if she would let it;
so she did just the funniest thing, perhaps, that ever a bride did
do: she set her door wide open from her pretty parlor, with its
books and flowers and pictures and window-draperies of hanging
vines, into the plain, cozy little kitchen, with its tin pans and
bright new buckets and its Shaker chairs; and when she was busy
there, asked her girl-friends right in, as she had used to take them
up into her bedroom, if she were doing anything pretty or had
something to show.

And they liked it, for the moment, at any rate; they could not help
it; they thought it was lovely; a kind of bewitching little play at
keeping house; though some of them went away and wondered, and said
that Rosamond Holabird had quite changed all her way of living and
her position; it was very splendid and strong-minded, they supposed;
but they never should have thought it of her, and of course she
could not keep it up.

"And the neighborhood!" was the cry. "The rabble she has got, and is
going to have, round her! All planks and sand, and tubs of mortar,
now; you have to half break your neck in getting up there; and when
it is settled it will be--such a frowze of common people! Why the
foreman of our factory has engaged a house, and Mrs. Haslam, who
actually used to do up laces for mamma, has got another!"

That is what is said--in some instances--over on West Hill, when the
elegant visitors came home from calling at the Horseshoe. Meanwhile,
what Rosamond does is something like this, which she happened to do
one bright afternoon a very little while ago.

She and Dorris had just made and baked a charming little tea-cake,
whic