“O, hens!  What did you make us think it was people for?”

“Don’t you ever let anybody know it was hens!  Never cackle about contrivances.  Things mustn’t be contrived; they must happen.  Woman and her accidents,—­mine are usually catastrophes.”

Rosamond was so busy fastening in the plume, and giving it the right set-up, that she talked a little delirium of nonsense.

Barbara flung down a magazine,—­some old number.

“Just as they were putting the very tassel on to the cap of the climax, the page is torn out!  What do you want, little cat?” she went on to her pussy, that had tumbled out of her lap as she got up, and was stretching and mewing.  “Want to go out doors and play, little cat?  Well, you can.  There’s plenty of room out of doors for two little cats!” And going to the door with her, she met grandfather and the cane coming in.

There was time enough for Mrs. Holabird to pull down the blinds, and for Ruth to take a long, thinking look out from under hers, through the sash of window left unshaded; for old Mr. Holabird and his cane were slow; the more awful for that.

Ruth thought to herself, “Yes; there is plenty of room out of doors; and yet people crowd so!  I wonder why we can’t live bigger!”

[Illustration]

Mrs. Holabird’s thinking was something like it.

“Five hundred dollars to worry about, for what is set down upon a few square yards of ‘out of doors.’  And inside of that, a great contriving and going without, to put something warm underfoot over the sixteen square feet that we live on most!”

She had almost a mind to pull up the blinds again; it was such a very little matter, the bit of new carpet, after all.

“How do I know what they were thinking?” Never mind.  People do know, or else how do they ever tell stories?  We know lots of things that we don’t tell all the time.  We don’t stop to think whether we know them or not; but they are underneath the things we feel, and the things we do.

Grandfather came in, and said over the same old stereotypes.  He had a way of saying them, so that we knew just what was coming, sentence after sentence.  It was a kind of family psalter.  What it all meant was, “I’ve looked in to see you, and how you are getting along.  I do think of you once in a while.”  And our worn-out responses were, “It’s very good of you, and we’re much obliged to you, as far as it goes.”

It was only just as he got up to leave that he said the real thing.  When there was one, he always kept it to the last.

“Your lease is up here in May, isn’t it, Mrs. Stephen?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m going to move over that Beaman house next month, as soon as the around settles.  I thought it might suit you, perhaps, to come and live in it.  It would be handier about a good many things than it is now.  Stephen might do something to his piece, in a way of small farming.  I’d let him have the rent for three years.  You can talk it over.”