s who
should simply have been having a good time? We should not tell you if
we did not know; it _begins_ right there among them, in just such
things as these; and our day and our life are full of it.

The Marchbanks set had a way of taking things off people's hands, as
soon as they were proved worth while. People like the Holabirds could
not be taking this pains every day; making their cakes and their
coffee, and setting their tea-table in their parlor; putting aside all
that was shabby or inadequate, for a few special hours, and turning
all the family resources upon a point, to serve an occasion. But if
anything new or bright were so produced that could be transplanted, it
was so easy to receive it among the established and every-day
elegances of a freer living, give it a wider introduction, and so
adopt and repeat and centralize it that the originators should fairly
forget they had ever begun it. And why would not this be honor enough?
Invention must always pass over to the capital that can handle it.

The new game charmed them all. The girls had the best of it, for the
young men always gathered up the rings and brought them to each in
turn. It was very pretty to receive both hands full of the gayly
wreathed and knotted hoops, to hold them slidden along one arm like
garlands, to pass them lightly from hand to hand again, and to toss
them one by one through the air with a motion of more or less
inevitable grace; and the excitement of hope or of success grew with
each succeeding trial.

They could not help liking it, even the most fastidious; they might
venture upon liking it, for it was a game with an origin and
references. It was an officers' game, on board great naval ships; it
had proper and sufficient antecedents. It would do.

By the time they stopped playing in the twilight, and went up the wide
end steps upon the deep, open platform, where coffee and biscuits
began to be fragrant, Rosamond knew that her party was as nice as if
it had been anybody's else whoever; that they were all having as
genuinely good a time as if they had not come "westover" to get it.

And everybody does like a delicious tea, such as is far more sure and
very different from hands like Mrs. Holabird's and her daughters, than
from those of a city confectioner and the most professed of private
cooks.

It all went off and ended in a glory,--the glory of the sun pouring
great backward floods of light and color all up to the summer zenith