Kate Sencerbox, or Bel Bree, was glad to come into this nest-warm pleasantness, when the mother must leave it for a while.  It was not an irksomeness flung by, like a tangled skein, for somebody else to tug at and unravel; it was a joy in running order.

When the hard Monday came, or the baby had her little tribulations, or it took a good tithe of the time to run and tell callers that Mrs. Scherman was “very much engaged”—­(why can’t it be the fashion to put those messages out upon the door-knob, or to tie it up with—­a silk duster, or a knot of tape?)—­Kate or Bel would look one at another and say, as they began with saying,—­“Now, shut up!” It was an understood thing that they were not to “fly out with discouragements.”

And nobody knows how many things would straighten themselves if that could only be made the law of the land.

On Wednesday evenings, Mrs. Scherman always managed it that they should both go to Desire Ledwith’s, for the Read-and-Talk.

You may say Jerusalem is not taken yet, after all; there are plenty of “hard places,” where girls like Kate Sencerbox and Bel Bree would not stay a week; there are hundreds of women, heads of houses, who would not be bothered with so much superfluous intelligence,—­with refinements so nearly on a level with their own.

Granted:  but it is the first steps that cost.  Do you not think—­do you not know—­that a real good, planted in the world,—­in social living,—­must spread, from point to point where the circumstance is ready, where it is the “next thing?” If you do not believe this, you do not practically believe in the kingdom ever coming at all.

There is a rotation of crops in living and in communities, as well as in the order of vegetation of secret seeds that lie in the earth’s bosom.

We shall not always be rank with noisome weeds and thistles; here and there, the better thought is swelling toward the germination; the cotyledons of a fairer hope are rising through the mould.

CHAPTER XXIX.

WINTERGREEN.

To tell of what has been happening with Sylvie Argenter’s thread of our story, we must go back some weeks and pages to the time just after the great fire.

As it was with the spread of the conflagration itself, so it proved also with the results,—­of loss, and deprivation, and change.  Many seemed at first to stand safely away out on the margin, mere lookers-on, to whom presently, with more or less direct advance, the great red wave of ruin reached, touching, scorching, consuming.

It was a week afterward that Sylvie Argenter learned that the Manufacturers’ Insurance Company, in which her mother had, at her persuasion, invested the little actual, tangible remnant of her property, had found itself swallowed up in its enormous debt; must reorganize, begin again, with fresh capital and new stockholders.