“But you ought to come into my parlor, among my friends!  People would be glad to get you into their parlors, by and by, when you have made the name you can make.  I’ve no business to keep you down.  And you don’t know yourself.  You won’t stay.”

“Just please wait and see,” said Bel.  “I haven’t a great deal of experience in going about in parlors; but I don’t think I should much like it,—­that way.  I’d rather keep on being the woman that made the name, than to run round airing it.  I guess it would keep better.”

“I see I can’t advise you.  I shouldn’t dare to meddle with inspirations.  But I’m proud, and glad, Bel; and you’re my friend!  The rest will all work out right, somehow.”

“Thank you, dear Mrs. Scherman,” said Bel, her voice full of feeling.  “And—­if you please—­will you have the grouse broiled to-day, or roasted with bread-sauce?”

At that, the two young women laughed out, in each other’s faces.

Bel stopped first.

“It isn’t half so funny as it sounds,” she said.  “It’s part of the poetry; the rhyme’s inside; it is to everything.  We’re human people:  that’s the way we get it.”

And Bel went away, and stuffed the grouse, and grated her bread-crumbs, and sang over her work,—­not out loud with her lips, but over and over to a merry measure in her mind,—­

“Everything comes to its luck some day: 
I’ve got chickens!  What will folks say?”

“I’m solving more than I set out to do,” Sin Scherman said to her husband.  “Westover was nothing to it.  I know one thing, though, that I’ll do next.”

“One thing is reasonable,” said Frank.  “What is it?”

“Take her to York with us, this summer.  Row out on the river with her.  Sit on the rocks, and read and sew, and play with the children.  Show her the ocean.  She never saw it in all her life.”

“How wonderful is ‘one thing’ in the mind of a woman!  It is a germ-cell, that holds all things.”

“Thank you, my dear.  If I weren’t helping you to soup, I’d get up and make you a courtesy.  But what a grand privilege it is for a man to live with a woman, after he has found that out!  And how cosmical a woman feels herself when her capacity is recognized!”

Mrs. Scherman has told her plan to Bel.  Kate also has a plan for the two summer months in which the household must be broken up.

“I mean to see the mountains myself,” she said, boldly.  “I don’t see why I shouldn’t go to the country.  There are homes there that want help, as well as here.  I can get my living where the living goes.  That’s just where it fays in, different from other work.  Bel knows places where I could get two dollars a week just for a little helping round; or I could even afford to pay board, and buy a little time for resting.  I shall have clothes to make, and fix over.  It always took all I could earn, before, to keep me from hand to mouth.  I never saw six months’ wages all together, in my life.  I feel real rich.”