The Wyndhams had prepared for a pleasant day. Ruth had come to spend it with them, and hem the ruffles of her new white dimity. Jessamy, Phyllis, and Barbara had sewing, and the new machine which they had added to their belongings stood ready, with its top invitingly laid back, in Phyllis's room, where the strongest and longest light came.
"If we had nothing to do but practise a little music, get through a little shopping, make and receive a few calls, we should miss all this sort of pleasantness," said Jessamy, touching up a bow on a hat she was trimming, and holding it off to look at it with one eye shut in true artistic manner.
"Half the best things of life are not to be met on the highways; it's the byways which are loveliest, figuratively and literally," said Ruth, contentedly.
"That sounds like a poem condensed into prose," remarked Bab. "Are you going to drop into poetry?"
Ruth laughed. "All happy people must be more or less poetical, I fancy," she said. "I wonder if Silas Wegg meant more than he knew when he talked about dropping into poetry in the light of a friend? If you're friendly toward life and people, then you get happy, then poetical; it's a clear sequence in my mind, only I haven't expressed it clearly."
"Not very, Ruth, and that's undeniable," laughed Phyllis. "I am perfectly certain Mr. Wegg meant nothing so complex. However, your idea is all right; I know from experience one becomes a poet under pressure of happiness."
"One does; the rest don't," said Jessamy. "Phyllis sings yards of rhymes when she's jolly, but Bab and I remain prose copies."
"Won't you show me that story you wrote, and Jessamy's illustrations?" said Ruth. "I'll solemnly—and safely—promise not to go home and reproduce either."
Phyllis arose and took from her desk several sheets of foolscap, covered with painstaking writing. She also produced several squares of Bristol board, and gave it all into Ruth's hands. "You won't appreciate the drawings unless you read the story," she said. "We think Jessamy has come out in an entirely new vein, and never has done anything to compare with this."
Ruth looked at the drawings with surprise and admiration growing greater every moment. "Why," she cried at last, "I should think she had come out and surpassed herself! Why, Jessamy, they're exquisite! Dainty, graceful, but strong, and—I can't say what I mean—original is a stupid word, yet I can't get hold of a better."