where they had not got
on as fast as some of the other girls; so that they were a year behind
in graduating from the grammar-school, where Lapham thought that they
had got education enough. His wife was of a different mind; she would
have liked them to go to some private school for their finishing. But
Irene did not care for study; she preferred house-keeping, and both the
sisters were afraid of being snubbed by the other girls, who were of a
different sort from the girls of the grammar-school; these were mostly
from the parks and squares, like themselves. It ended in their going
part of a year. But the elder had an odd taste of her own for reading,
and she took some private lessons, and read books out of the
circulating library; the whole family were amazed at the number she
read, and rather proud of it.

They were not girls who embroidered or abandoned themselves to
needle-work. Irene spent her abundant leisure in shopping for herself
and her mother, of whom both daughters made a kind of idol, buying her
caps and laces out of their pin-money, and getting her dresses far
beyond her capacity to wear. Irene dressed herself very stylishly, and
spent hours on her toilet every day. Her sister had a simpler taste,
and, if she had done altogether as she liked, might even have slighted
dress. They all three took long naps every day, and sat hours together
minutely discussing what they saw out of the window. In her
self-guided search for self-improvement, the elder sister went to many
church lectures on a vast variety of secular subjects, and usually came
home with a comic account of them, and that made more matter of talk
for the whole family. She could make fun of nearly everything; Irene
complained that she scared away the young men whom they got acquainted
with at the dancing-school sociables. They were, perhaps, not the
wisest young men.

The girls had learned to dance at Papanti's; but they had not belonged
to the private classes. They did not even know of them, and a great
gulf divided them from those who did. Their father did not like
company, except such as came informally in their way; and their mother
had remained too rustic to know how to attract it in the sophisticated
city fashion. None of them had grasped the idea of European travel;
but they had gone about to mountain and sea-side resorts, the mother
and the two girls, where they witnessed the spectacle which such
resorts present throughout New En