“It looks nice,” Bel said to Mrs. Scherman, “and we don’t expect to light it, unless one of us is sick, or something.”

“Light it whenever you wish for it,” Mrs. Scherman had replied.  “I am perfectly willing to trust your reasonableness for that.”

So on Sunday afternoons, or of a bitter cold morning, they had their own little blaze to sit or dress by; and it made the difference of a continual feeling of cheeriness and comfort to them, always possible when not immediately actual; and of a bushel or two of coal, perhaps, in the winter’s supply of fuel.

“Where were the babies of a Sunday afternoon,—­and how about the offered tending?”

This was one more place for them also; a treat and a change to Sinsie and Marmaduke, or a perfectly safe and sweet and comfortable resource in tending Baby Karen, who would lie content on the soft quilts by the half hour, feeling in the blind, ignorant way that little babies certainly do, the novelty and rest.

The household, you see, was melting into one; the spirit of home was above and below.  It was home as much as wages, that these girls had come for; and they expected to help make it.  Not that they parted with their own individual lives and interests, either; every one must have things that are separate; it is the way human souls and lives are made.  It would have been so with daughters, or sisters.  But in a true living, it is the individual interests that at once aggregate and specialize, it is a putting into the common stock that which must be distinct and real that it may be put in at all.  It was not money and goods alone, that the early Christians had in common.

Instead of a part of their house being foreign and distasteful,—­tolerated through necessity only, that the rest might be ministered to,—­there was a region in it, now, of new, extended family pleasure.  “It was as good as building out a conservatory, or a billiard-room,” Asenath said.  “It was just so much more to enjoy.”

There was a little old rocking-chair, railed round till it was almost like a basket, with just a break in the front palings to sit into.  It had a soft down cushion, covered with a damask patterned patch of wild and divaricating device; and its rockers were short, giving a jerk and thud if you leaned to and fro in it, like the trot an old nurse gives a child in an ordinary, four-legged, impracticable seat.  All the better for that; the rockers were not in the way; and all Aunt Blin had wanted of it as a sewing chair, was to tip conveniently, as she might wish to bend and reach, to pick up scissors or spool, or draw to herself any of those surroundings of part, pattern, or material, which are sure, at the moment one wants them to be on the opposite side of the table.