able multiple of them, every Wednesday
when the wash came in; and how these different kinds of lives, coming
together with a friendly friction, found themselves not so uncongenial,
or so incomprehensible to each other, after all,--all this, in its
detail of bright words, I cannot stop to tell you; it would take a good
many summers to go through one like this so fully; but when the big
bell rang for dinner, they all came down the ledge together, and Sue
and Martha Josselyn, for the first time in four weeks, felt themselves
fairly one with the current interest and life of the gay house in which
they had been dwellers and yet only lookers-on.

Mrs. Thoresby, coming down to dinner, a few minutes late, with her
daughters, and pausing--as people always did at the Green Cottage,
without knowing why--to step from the foot of the stairway to the open
piazza-door, and glance out before turning toward the dining-room, saw
the ledge party just dividing itself into its two little streams, that
were to head, respectively, for cottage and hotel.

"It is a wonder to me that Mrs. Linceford allows it!" was her comment.
"Just the odds and ends of all the company here. And those girls, who
might take whatever stand they pleased."

"Miss Leslie always finds out the nicest people, and the best times, _I_
think," said Etty, who had dragged through but a dull morning behind the
blinds of her mother's window, puzzling over crochet,--which she hated,
because she said it was like everlastingly poking one's finger after a
sliver,--and had caught now and then, over the still air, the laughter
and bird-notes that came together from among the pines. One of the Miss
Haughtleys had sat with them; but that only "stiffened out the
dullness," as Etty had declared, the instant the young lady left them.

"Don't be pert, Etty. You don't know what you want, or what is for your
interest. The Haddens were well enough, by themselves; but when it comes
to Tom, Dick, and Harry!"

"I don't believe that's elegant, mamma," said Etty demurely; "and there
isn't Tom, Dick, nor Harry; only Dakie Thayne, and that nice, _nice_
Miss Craydocke! And--I _hate_ the Haughtleys!" This with a sudden
explosiveness at the last, after the demureness.

"Etty!"--and Mrs. Thoresby intoned an indescribable astonishment of
displeasure in her utterance of her daughter's name,--"remember
yourself. You are neither to be impertinent to me, nor to speak rudely
of persons whom I choose fo