ves and brasses, do all that came hardest to us;
and could do, in other things, with and for us, what she saw us do. We
all worked together till the work was done; then Arctura sat down in
the afternoons, just as we did, and read books, or made her clothes.
She always looked nice and pretty. She had large dark calico aprons
for her work; and little white bib-aprons for table-tending and
dress-up; and mother made for her, on the machine, little linen
collars and cuffs.

We had a pride in her looks; and she knew it; she learned to work as
delicately as we did. When breakfast or dinner was ready, she was as
fit to turn round and serve as we were to sit down; she was astonished
herself, at ways and results that she fell in with and attained.

"Why, where does the dirt go to?" she would exclaim. "It never gethers
anywheres."

"GATHERS,--_anywhere_" Rosamond corrected.

Arctura learned little grammar lessons, and other such things, by the
way. She was only "next" below us in our family life; there was no
great gulf fixed. We felt that we had at least got hold of the right
end of one thread in the social tangle. This, at any rate, had come
out of our year at Westover.

"Things seem so easy," the girl would say. "It is just like two times
one."

So it was; because we did not jumble in all the Analysis and Compound
Proportion of housekeeping right on top of the multiplication-table.
She would get on by degrees; by and by she would be in evolution and
geometrical progression without knowing how she got there. If you want
a house, you must build it up, stone by stone, and stroke by stroke;
if you want a servant, you, or somebody for you, must _build_ one,
just the same; they do not spring up and grow, neither can be "knocked
together." And I tell you, busy, eager women of this day, wanting
great work out of doors, this is just what "we girls," some of
us,--and some of the best of us, perhaps,--have got to stay at home
awhile and do.

"It is one of the little jobs that has been waiting for a good while
to be done," says Barbara; "and Miss Pennington has found out another.
'There may be,' she says, 'need of women for reorganizing town
meetings; I won't undertake to say there isn't; but I'm _sure_ there's
need of them for reorganizing _parlor_ meetings. They are getting to
be left altogether to the little school-girl "sets." Women who have
grown older, and can see through all that nonsense, and have the
position and power t