"Of course you're just a glorious old noblesse oblige-d! Why didn't you say something? You might have gone perhaps. We could all have helped. I'd have lent you—that garnet and white silk!"
Rosamond would not say anything more, and she would scarcely be kissed.
After all, she had co-operated more than any of us. Rose was always the daughter who objected and then did. I have often thought that young man in Scripture ought to have been a woman. It is more a woman's way.
The maples were in their gold and vermilion now, and the round masses of the ash were shining brown; we filled the vases with their leaves, and pressed away more in all the big books we could confiscate, and hunted frosted ferns in the wood-edge, and had beautiful pine blazes morning and evening in the brown room, and began to think how pleasant, for many cosey things, the winter was going to be, out here at Westover.
"How nicely we could keep Halloween," said Ruth, "round this great open chimney! What a row of nuts we could burn!"
"So we will," said Rosamond. "We'll ask the girls. Mayn't we, mother?"
"To tea?"
"No. Only to the fun,—and some supper. We can have that all ready in the other room."
"They'll see the cooking-stove."
"They won't know it, when they do," said Barbara.