The winter before, Frank had been a few weeks in New York.  But it tired her dreadfully, she said.  She liked the theatres and the concerts, and walking out and seeing the shops.  But there was “no place to get out of it into.”  It didn’t seem as if she ever really got home and took off her things.  She told Laura it was like that first old letter of hers; it was just “wearing,” all the time.

Laura laughed.  “But how can you live without wearing?” said she.

Frank stood by, wondering, while Laura unpacked her trunks that morning after her second arrival at Aunt Oldways’.  She had done now even with the simplicity of white and violet, and her wardrobe blossomed out like the flush of a summer garden.

She unfolded a rose-colored muslin, with little raised embroidered spots, and threw it over the bed.

“Where will you wear that, up here?” asked Frank, in pure bewilderment.

“Why, I wear it to church, with my white Swiss mantle,” answered Laura.  “Or taking tea, or anything.  I’ve a black silk visite for cool days.  That looks nice with it.  And see here,—­I’ve a pink sunshade.  They don’t have them much yet, even in New York.  Mr. Pemberton Oferr brought these home from Paris, for Gerry and Alice, and me.  Gerry’s is blue.  See! it tips back.”  And Laura set the dashy little thing with its head on one side, and held it up coquettishly.

“They used them in carriages in Paris, he said, and in St. Petersburg, driving out on the Nevskoi Prospekt.”

“But where are your common things?”

“Down at the bottom; I haven’t come to them.  They were put in first, because they would bear squeezing.  I’ve two French calicoes, with pattern trimmings; and a lilac jaconet, with ruffles, open down the front.”

Laura wore long dresses now; and open wrappers were the height of the style.

Laura astonished Homesworth the first Sunday of this visit, with her rose-colored toilet.  Bonnet of shirred pink silk with moss rosebuds and a little pink lace veil; the pink muslin, full-skirted over two starched petticoats; even her pink belt had gay little borders of tiny buds and leaves, and her fan had a pink tassel.

“They’re the things I wear; why shouldn’t I?” she said to Frank’s remonstrance.

“But up here!” said Frank.  “It would seem nicer to wear something—­stiller.”

So it would; a few years afterward Laura herself would have seen that it was more elegant; though Laura Shiere was always rather given to doing the utmost—­in apparel—­that the occasion tolerated.  Fashions grew stiller in years after.  But this June Sunday, somewhere in the last thirties or the first forties, she went into the village church like an Aurora, and the village long remembered the resplendence.  Frank had on a white cambric dress, with a real rose in the bosom, cool and fresh, with large green leaves; and her “cottage straw” was trimmed with white lutestring, crossed over the crown.