member is
to provide one practical answer to 'What next?' 'Next Thursday' is
always to be in charge of somebody. You may do what you like, or can,
with it. I'll manage the first myself. After that I wash my hands."

Out of it grew fourteen incomparable Thursday evenings. Pretty much
all we can do about them is to tell that they were; we should want
fourteen new numbers to write their full history. It was like Mr.
Hale's lovely "Ten Times One is Ten." They all came from that one
blessed little Halloween party of ours. It means something that there
_is_ such a thing as the multiplication-table; doesn't it? You can't
help yourself if you start a unit, good or bad. The Garden of Eden,
and the Ark, and the Loaves and Fishes, and the Hundred and Forty-four
Thousand sealed in their foreheads, tell of it, all through the Bible,
from first to last. "Multiply!" was the very next, inevitable
commandment, after the "Let there be!"

It was such a thing as had never rolled up, or branched out, though,
in Westover before. The Marchbankses did not know what to make of it.
People got in who had never belonged. There they were, though, in the
stately old Pennington house, that was never thrown open for nothing;
and when they were once there you really could not tell the
difference; unless, indeed, it were that the old, middle wood was the
deadest, just as it is in the trees; and that the life was in the new
sap and the green rind.

Lucilla Waters invented charades; and Helen Josselyn acted them, as
charades had never been acted on West Hill until now. When it came to
the Hobarts' "Next Thursday" they gave us "Dissolving Views,"--every
successive queer fashion that had come up resplendent and gone down
grotesque in these last thirty years. Mrs. Hobart had no end of old
relics,--bandbaskets packed full of venerable bonnets, that in their
close gradation of change seemed like one individual Indur passing
through a metempsychosis of millinery; nests of old hats that were
odder than the bonnets; swallow-tailed coats; broad-skirted blue ones
with brass buttons; baby waists and basquines; leg-of-mutton sleeves,
balloons, and military; collars inch-wide and collars ell-wide with
ruffles _rayonnantes_; gathers and gores, tunnel-skirts, and
barrel-skirts and paniers. She made monstrous paper dickeys,
and high black stocks, and great bundling neckcloths; the very
pocket-handkerchiefs were as ridiculous as anything, from the
waiter-napkin size o