would
have been let in. She had lived in this necromantic ring; she would
be married in it; she would die and be buried in it; and of all the
wide, rich, beautiful champaign of life beyond,--of all its noble
heights, and hidden, tender hollows,--its gracious harvest fields, and
its deep, grand, forest glooms,--she would be content, elegantly and
exclusively, to know nothing. To her wedding people might come,
indeed, from a distance,--geographically; but they would come out of a
precisely corresponding little sphere in some other place, and fit
right into this one, for the time being, with the most edifying
sameness.

From the east and the west, the north and the south, they began to
come, days beforehand,--the people who could not let Leslie
Goldthwaite be married without being there. There were no proclamation
cards issued, bearing in imposing characters the announcement of
"Their Daughter's Marriage," by Mr. and Mrs. Aaron Goldthwaite, after
the like of which one almost looks to see, and somewhat feels the need
of, the regular final invocation,--"God save the Commonwealth!"

There had been loving letters sent here and there; old Miss Craydocke,
up in the mountains, got one, and came down a month earlier in
consequence, and by the way of Boston. She stayed there at Mrs. Frank
Scherman's; and Frank and his wife and little Sinsie, the baby,--"she
isn't Original Sin, as I was," says her mother,--came up to Z----
together, and stopped at the hotel. Martha Josselyn came from New
York, and stayed, of course, with the Inglesides.

Martha is a horrible thing, girls; how do you suppose I dare to put
her in here as I do? She is a milliner. And this is how it happens.
Her father is a comparatively poor man,--a book-keeper with a salary.
There are ever so many little Josselyns; and Martha has always felt
bound to help. She is not very likely to marry, and she is not one to
take it into her calculation, if she were; but she is of the sort who
are said to be "cut out for old maids," and she knows it. She could
not teach music, nor keep a school, her own schooling--not her
education; God never lets that be cut short--was abridged by the need
of her at home. But she could do anything in the world with scissors
and needle; and she can make just the loveliest bonnets that ever were
put together.

So, as she can help more by making two bonnets in a day, and getting
six dollars for them beside the materials, she lets her step-mother