e
older, in her feeling toward Leslie. She had never known any one just
like her; and, in truth, Leslie was different, in some things, from
the little world of girls about her. In the "each and all" of their
pretty groupings and pleasant relations she was like a bit of fresh,
springing, delicate vine in a bouquet of bright, similarly beautiful
flowers; taking little free curves and reaches of her own, just as she
had grown; not tied, nor placed, nor constrained; never the central or
most brilliant thing; but somehow a kind of life and grace that helped
and touched and perfected all.

There was something very real and individual about her; she was no
"girl of the period," made up by the fashion of the day. She would
have grown just as a rose or a violet would, the same in the first
quarter of the century or the third. They called her "grandmotherly"
sometimes, when a certain quaint primitiveness that was in her showed
itself. And yet she was the youngest girl in all that set, as to
simpleness and freshness and unpretendingness, though she was in her
twentieth year now, which sounds--didn't somebody say so over my
shoulder?--so very old! Adelaide Marchbanks used to say of her that
she had "stayed fifteen."

She _looked_ real. Her bright hair was gathered up loosely, with some
graceful turn that showed its fine shining strands had all been
freshly dressed and handled, under a wide-meshed net that lay lightly
around her head; it was not packed and stuffed and matted and put on
like a pad or bolster, from the bump of benevolence, all over that and
everything else gentle and beautiful, down to the bend of her neck;
and her dress suggested always some one simple idea which you could
trace through it, in its harmony, at a glance; not complex and
bewildering and fatiguing with its many parts and folds and
festoonings and the garnishings of every one of these. She looked more
as young women used to look before it took a lady with her dressmaker
seven toilsome days to achieve a "short street suit," and the public
promenades became the problems that they now are to the inquiring
minds that are forced to wonder who stops at home and does up all the
sewing, and where the hair all comes from.

Some of the girls said, sometimes, that "Leslie Goldthwaite liked to
be odd; she took pains to be." This was not true; she began with the
prevailing fashion--the fundamental idea of it--always, when she had a
new thing; but she modified and