hing about it, as
at first she meant to do.

But Mrs. Holabird had a way of coming right into things. "We girls"
means Mrs. Holabird as much as anybody. It was always "we girls" in
her heart, since girls' mothers never can quite lose the girl out of
themselves; it only multiplies, and the "everlasting nominative" turns
into a plural.

Ruth still sat in her white chair, with her cheek on her hand and her
elbow on the window-ledge, looking out across the pleasant swell of
grass to where they were cutting the first hay in old Mr. Holabird's
five-acre field, the click of the mowing-machine sounding like some
new, gigantic kind of grasshopper, chirping its tremendous laziness
upon the lazy air, when mother came in from the front hall, through
her own room and saw her there.

Mrs. Holabird never came through the rooms without a fresh thrill of
pleasantness. Her home had _expressed_ itself here, as it had never
done anywhere else. There was something in the fair, open, sunshiny
roominess and cosey connection of these apartments, hers and her
daughters', in harmony with the largeness and cheeriness and clearness
in which her love and her wish for them held them always.

It was more glad than grand; and she aimed at no grandness; but the
generous space was almost splendid in its effect, as you looked
through, especially to her who had lived and contrived in a "spy-glass
house" so long.

The doors right through from front to back, and the wide windows at
either end and all the way, gave such sweep and light; also the long
mirrors, that had been from time unrememberable over the mantels in
the town parlors, in the old, useless, horizontal style, and were here
put, quite elegantly tall,--the one in Mrs. Holabird's room above her
daintily appointed dressing-table (which was only two great square
trunks full of blankets, that could not be stowed away anywhere else,
dressed up in delicate-patterned chintz and set with her boxes and
cushions and toilet-bottles), and the other, in "the girls' room,"
opposite; these made magnificent reflections and repetitions; and at
night, when they all lit their bed-candles, and vibrated back and
forth with their last words before they shut their doors and subsided,
gave a truly festival and illuminated air to the whole mansion; so
that Mrs. Roderick would often ask, when she came in of a morning in
their busiest time, "Did you have company last night? I saw you were
all lit up."

"We had one