"It means that people love each other very much—" I began, and got no further.
"Oh, goody grand," cried Little Child. "Then I'm engaged, aren't I? To everybody."
Whenever she leads me in deep water, I am accustomed to invite her to a dolphin's back by bidding her say over some song or spell which I have taught her. This afternoon while we waited on the lawn and her little voice went among the charmed words, something happened which surely must have been due to a prank of the dolphin. For when she had taken an accurate way to the last stanza of "Lucy," Little Child soberly concluded:—
"'She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and what's
The difference to me!'"
But, even so, it was charming to have had the quiet metre present.
I hope that there is no one who has not sometime been in a company on which he has looked and looked with something living in his eyes; on a company all of whom he holds in some degree of tenderness. It was so that I looked this afternoon on those who came across the lawn in the pleasant five o'clock sun, and I looked with a difference from my manner of looking on that evening of my visit to the village, when I first saw these, my neighbours. Then I saw them with delight; now I see them with delight-and-that-difference; and though that difference is, so to say, partly in my throat, yet it is chiefly deep in my understanding. There came my Mis' Amanda Toplady, with her great green umbrella, which she carries summer and winter; Mis' Postmaster Sykes, with the full-blooming stalk of her tuberose pinned on her left shoulder; Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss in the pink nun's veiling of the Post-office hall supper; and my neighbour, who had consented to come, with: "I donno as that little thing would want I should stay home. Oh, but do you know, that's the worst—knowin' that the little thing never saw me and can't think about me at all!" And there came also those of whom it chances that this summer I have seen less than I should have wished: the Liberty sisters, in checked print. "It don't seem so much of a jump out of mournin' into wash goods as it does into real dress-up cloth," gentle Miss Lucy says. And Abigail Arnold, of the Home Bakery, who sent a great sugared cake for to-day's occasion. "Birthday cakes is correct," she observed, "an' weddin' cake is correct. Why ain't engagement cakes correct—especially when folks get along without the ring? I donno. I always think doin' for folks is correct, whether it's the style or whether it ain't." And Mis' Photographer Sturgis, with a new and upbraiding baby; Mis' Fire Chief Merriman in "new black, but not true mournin' now, an' anyway lit up by pearl buttons an' a lace handkerchief an' plenty o' scent." And Mis' "Mayor" Uppers who, the "mayor" not returning to his home and the tickets for the parlour clock having all been sold, to-day began offering for sale tickets on the "parlour 'suit,' brocade' silk, each o' the four pieces a differ'nt colour and all as bright as new-in-the-store." And though we all understood what she was doing and she knew that we all knew, she yet drew us aside, one after another, to offer the tickets for sale privately, and we slipped the money to her beneath our handkerchiefs or our fans or our sewing.
We all had our sewing—even I have become pleasantly contaminated and have once or twice essayed eyelets. Though there was but an hour to elapse before supper-time and the arrival of the "men-folks," we settled ourselves about the green, making scallops on towels, or tatting for sheet hems, or crocheted strips for the hems of pillow-slips. Mis' Sykes had, as she almost always does have, new work which no one had ever seen before, and new work is accounted of almost as much interest as a new waist and is kept for a surprise, as a new waist should be kept. Little Child, too, had her sewing; she was buttonhole-stitching a wash-cloth and talking like a little old woman. I think that the little elf children like best to pretend in this way, as regular, arrant witches feign old womanhood.