“Are you nearly ready, girls?” came in mother’s voice from above.

“Yes, ma’am,” Harry answered back, in an excessively cheery way.  “We’re coming”; and up the stairs all three came together, greatly to Mrs. Holabird’s astonishment.

“You never know where help is coming from when you’re trying to do your duty,” said Barbara, in a high-moral way.  “Prince Percinet, Mrs. Holabird.”

“Miss Polly-put—­” began Harry Goldthwaite, brimming up with a half-diffident mischief.  But Barbara walked round to her place at the table with a very great dignity.

People think that young folks can only have properly arranged and elaborately provided good times; with Germania band pieces, and bouquets and ribbons for the German, and oysters and salmon-salad and sweatmeat-and-spun-sugar “chignons”; at least, commerce games and bewitching little prizes.  Yet when lives just touch each other naturally, as it were,—­dip into each other’s little interests and doings, and take them as they are, what a multiplication-table of opportunities it opens up!  You may happen upon a good time any minute, then.  Neighborhoods used to go on in that simple fashion; life used to be “co-operative.”

Mother said something like that after Leslie and Harry had gone away.

“Only you can’t get them into it again,” objected Rosamond.  “It’s a case of Humpty Dumpty.  The world will go on.”

“One world will,” said Barbara.  “But the world is manifold.  You can set up any kind of a monad you like, and a world will shape itself round it.  You’ve just got to live your own way, and everything that belongs to it will be sure to join on.  You’ll have a world before you know it.  I think myself that’s what the Ark means, and Mount Ararat, and the Noachian—­don’t they call it?—­new foundation.  That’s the way they got up New England, anyhow.”

“Barbara, what flights you take!”

“Do I?  Well, we have to.  The world lives up nineteen flights now, you know, besides the old broken-down and buried ones.”

It was a few days after that, that the news came to mother of Aunt Radford’s illness, and she had to go up to Oxenham.  Father went with her, but he came back the same night.  Mother had made up her mind to stay a week.  And so we had to keep house without her.

One afternoon Grandfather Holabird came down.  I don’t know why, but if ever mother did happen to be out of the way, it seemed as if he took the time to talk over special affairs with father.  Yet he thought everything of “Mrs. Stephen,” too, and he quite relied upon her judgment and influence.  But I think old men do often feel as if they had got their sons back again, quite to themselves, when the Mrs. Stephens or the Mrs. Johns leave them alone for a little.