We're coming"; and up the stairs all three came together, greatly to
Mrs. Holabird's astonishment.

"You never know where help is coming from when you're trying to do
your duty," said Barbara, in a high-moral way. "Prince Percinet, Mrs.
Holabird."

"Miss Polly-put--" began Harry Goldthwaite, brimming up with a
half-diffident mischief. But Barbara walked round to her place at the
table with a very great dignity.

People think that young folks can only have properly arranged and
elaborately provided good times; with Germania band pieces, and
bouquets and ribbons for the German, and oysters and salmon-salad and
sweatmeat-and-spun-sugar "chignons"; at least, commerce games and
bewitching little prizes. Yet when lives just touch each other
naturally, as it were,--dip into each other's little interests and
doings, and take them as they are, what a multiplication-table of
opportunities it opens up! You may happen upon a good time any
minute, then. Neighborhoods used to go on in that simple fashion; life
used to be "co-operative."

Mother said something like that after Leslie and Harry had gone away.

"Only you can't get them into it again," objected Rosamond. "It's a
case of Humpty Dumpty. The world will go on."

"_One_ world will," said Barbara. "But the world is manifold. You can
set up any kind of a monad you like, and a world will shape itself
round it. You've just got to live your own way, and everything that
belongs to it will be sure to join on. You'll have a world before you
know it. I think myself that's what the Ark means, and Mount Ararat,
and the Noachian--don't they call it?--new foundation. That's the way
they got up New England, anyhow."

"Barbara, what flights you take!"

"Do I? Well, we have to. The world lives up nineteen flights now, you
know, besides the old broken-down and buried ones."

It was a few days after that, that the news came to mother of Aunt
Radford's illness, and she had to go up to Oxenham. Father went with
her, but he came back the same night. Mother had made up her mind to
stay a week. And so we had to keep house without her.

One afternoon Grandfather Holabird came down. I don't know why, but if
ever mother did happen to be out of the way, it seemed as if he took
the time to talk over special affairs with father. Yet he thought
everything of "Mrs. Stephen," too, and he quite relied upon her
judgment and influence. But I think old men do often feel as if they
had got their sons