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Lavinia Dorman has decided to stay with me and do without her maid, rather than take a cottage, or board, for we find that we do not wear on each other in the least.  We never plan for one another, or interfere in any way, and each takes it for granted that if the other desires assistance of any sort, she will ask for it.

Miss Lavinia pokes about the garden at her own sweet will.  I gather the flowers,—­I could not give that up to any one,—­and she takes charge of arranging them in the house.  She is very fond of doing fancy work, I am not, so that her offer to re-cover the sofa cushions in den, study, and library comes in the light of a household benefaction.

Besides this, she has a very good effect upon the boys, and without being at all fussy, she is instilling their absorbent minds quite unconsciously with some little bits of the quaint good breeding of other days that they will never forget.  They love to go to town with her, one of her first stipulations being that if I chose to include her in some of our long drives, well and good, otherwise she wished the liberty of telephoning the stable for horse and man, whenever she pleased, without my troubling myself about her movements.

Meanwhile, I really think that this living in the midst of a family without losing her independence is making Lavinia Dorman grow backwards toward youth.  She has bought an outing hat without strings, trimmed with fluffy white, she takes her work out under the trees in a basket, and has given up tying her head in a thin and a thick veil every time she drives out.  If she could learn to sit comfortably back and lounge a trifle, and if a friendly magpie would only chance along and steal her stock of fronts, for a nest, so that she would be obliged to show her own lovely hair that shades like oxidized silver, the transformation would be complete.

Martin Cortright also is developing mental energy.  He always had considerable physical vim, as I found the Sunday after he first came, when he accompanied Evan upon one of his long walks, and was not used up by it.  He has stopped fumbling with reference books and shuffling bits of paper by the hour, and writes industriously every day by the west window of the attic, where he can refresh himself by looking out of the window at the garden, or across at the passers on the highway.  I was afraid that he might wish to read the results nightly to either father or Evan, but no, he keeps them safely under lock and key in a great teacher’s desk that he bought second hand over in town.  He stays to dine with us two or three nights a week, but he has grown flexible, and our meals are very merry ones.  Laugh softly to yourself, Experience Book, and flutter your leaves just a bit as I write, that of their own volition, Miss Lavinia and Martin have drifted from whist to piquet, as by natural transition, and Evan is free for garden saunterings once more.