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Miss Goldthwaite was singularly discursive and fragmentary in her conversation this morning, somehow. She dropped the map-traveling suddenly, and asked a new question. "And how comes on the linen-drawer?" "O Cousin Del! I'm humiliated, disgusted! I feel as small as butterflies' pinfeathers! I've been to see the Haddens. Mrs.
The girls asked all their partners in the German, and the matronly ladies were asked, as a good many respectable people are civilly invited where their declining is counted upon. Leslie Goldthwaite, and the Haddens, and Mrs. Linceford, and the Thoresbys were all asked, and might come if they chose. Their stay would be another matter. And so the evening and the German went on.
Nevertheless they met the Haddens in the porch, in the glory of their purple pheasant plumes, whereof the long tail-feathers made great circles in the air as the young heads turned this way and that, in the excitement of a few snatched words before they entered.
Of course she did not do this when the Marchbankses were there, or if Miss Pennington called; but she could not resist the Haddens and Leslie Goldthwaite; besides, "they did have to make their own cake, and why should they be ashamed of it?" Rosamond would reply that "they did have to make their own beds, but they could not bring them down stairs for parlor work."
You can think how she waited, trying to believe she could bear any decision, for the final determination concerning her. "If it had been to Newport or Saratoga, I should have said no at once," said Mr. Goldthwaite. "Mrs. Linceford is a gay, extravagant woman, and the Haddens' ideas don't precisely suit mine. But the mountains, she can't get into much harm there."
They waited a little there, in the wide, open door together, and looked out upon it; and then the Haddens went round into their sister's room, and Leslie was left alone in the rare, sweet, early air.
Leslie Goldthwaite came up to the Haddens', or they went down to the Goldthwaites'. The Haddens would stay over night at the Marchbanks', and on through the next day, and over night again. There were, indeed, three recognized degrees of intimacy: that which took tea, that which came in of a morning and stayed to lunch, and that which was kept over night without plan or ceremony.
When more than one boat is launched to go to a wreck, there is always a rivalry among the boatmen of the coast to try who will be the first on board, and if anything had been wanting to make the young Haddens toil harder than they had been doing, this would have made them. Yet on they went.
They have not a very great deal of money, like the Haddens, and they are not foremost in everything like the Marchbankses; somehow they do not seem to care to take the trouble for that; but they are so established; it is a family like an old tree, that is past its green branching time, and makes little spread or summer show, but whose roots reach out away underneath, and grasp more ground than all the rest put together.
It was Thursday, just at dusk, when Adelaide Marchbanks walked over, at last, and proffered her invitation. "You had better all come to us," she said, graciously. "It is a pity to divide. We want the same people, of course, the Hendees, and the Haddens, and Leslie." She hardly attempted to disguise that we ourselves were an afterthought.
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