"O, not yet. I want to look around a few days first."
"All right—you're the captain! only we can't have any company till we get some furniture."
True enough! there was the excuse for buying the furniture; even if she were to go to the city she would be home during the summer, and she would want to entertain her friends. The fever seized her thereupon, and she plunged into planning and cataloguing. They had but little to spend, and she was put to her wit's end to passably furnish the house.
This filled in the first week or two of her stay, and she suffered less from loneliness than she expected; it came only at intervals, just before going to sleep, or in the morning, as she made her toilet for each new but eventless day.
As the home came to look pretty and complete, she thought of asking Josie to come on to visit her, and finally wrote her, and when she had promised to come, there was something to look forward to.
Meanwhile, she found something wrong between herself and her old friends. She meant to be just the same as ever, and at first she seemed to succeed, but she found herself not listening to them, or looking at them with alien eyes. She heard their harsh, loud voices, not their words, and she saw their stiff, ungraceful gestures instead of the fancy-work and worked-over dresses which they showed her. They looked at each other with significant nods. Other young people had gone away to school without acquiring airs, why should she?
It was not her education in books, but in manners, which made her alien. She was educated above them, too. Her thoughts were higher than theirs, and she did not attempt to play the hypocrite. She was not interested in them; for the most part they bored her. In a few cases the misunderstanding grew to be anger and distrust.
Carl drove over once with his bride-elect, and they all sat stiffly in the front room for one distressing hour; then they left, never to come again.
Sarah counted the visit not all in vain, however, for she quite closely reproduced Rose's shirt-waist the following week—that much she got out of the call. Carl was awed and troubled a little by the failure of his bride to get on with Rose, and Rose was bitter over it in heart. She could not see the fun of all this, as so many story-writers had done. It was all pitiful and bitter and barren, and to eat with the knife and drink coffee with a loud, sipping sound were inexcusable misdemeanors to her overwrought temper.
Josie came in like a little oriole. She fluffed down off the train like a bunch of lilac bloom one July day.