here was a curtain to be made, first of all. Miss Craydocke
would undertake that, drafting Leslie and the Miss Josselyns to help
her; they should all come to her room early to-morrow, and they would
have it ready by ten o'clock. Leslie wondered a little that she found
_work_ for them to do: a part of the play she thought would have been
better; but Miss Craydocke knew how that must come about. Besides, she
had more than one little line to lay and to pull, this serpent-wise old
maiden, in behalf of her ultimate designs concerning them.

I can't stay here under the pines and tell you all their talk this
summer morning,--how Sin Saxon grew social and saucy with the quiet Miss
Josselyns; how she fell upon the mending-basket and their notability,
and declared that the most foolish and pernicious proverb in the world
was that old thing about a stitch in time saving nine; it might save
certain special stitches; but how about the _time_ itself, and _other_
stitches? She didn't believe in it,--running round after a
darning-needle and forty other things, the minute a thread broke, and
dropping whatever else one had in hand, to let it ravel itself all out
again; "she believed in a good big basket, in a dark closet, and laying
up there for a rainy day, and being at peace in the pleasant weather.
Then, too, there was another thing; she didn't believe in notability
itself, at all: the more one was fool enough to know, the more one had
to do, all one's life long. Providence always took care of the lame and
the lazy; and, besides, those capable people never had contented minds.
They couldn't keep servants: their own fingers were always itching to do
things better. Her sister Effie was a lamentable instance. She'd married
a man,--well, not _very_ rich,--and she had set out to learn and direct
everything. The consequence was, she was like Eve after the apple,--she
knew good and evil; and wasn't the garden just a wilderness after that?
She never thought of it before, but she believed that was exactly what
that old poem in Genesis was written for!"

How Miss Craydocke answered, with her gentle, tolerant common-sense, and
right thought, and wide-awake brightness; how the Josselyns grew cordial
and confident enough to confess that, with five little children in the
house, there wasn't a great necessity for laying up against a rainy day,
and with stockings at a dollar and a half a pair, one was apt to get the
nine stitches, or a pretty comfort