“And I don’t,” said Sylvie boldly—­“when I’m by myself.  But there’s a kind of a little misgiving somehow, when they come, or when I go, as if—­well, as if there might be something to it that I didn’t know of, or behind it that I hadn’t got; or else, that there were things that they had nothing to do with that I know too much of.  A kind of a—­Poggowantimoc feeling, mother!  Amy Sherrett is so fearfully refined,—­all the way through!  It doesn’t seem as if she ever had any common things to say or do.  Don’t you think it takes common things to get people really near to each other?  It doesn’t seem to me I could ever be intimate—­or very easy—­with Amy Sherrett.”

“You seemed to get on well enough with her brother, the other day.”

“Boys aren’t half so bad.  There isn’t any such wax-work about boys.  Besides,”—­and Sylvie laughed a low, gay little laugh,—­we got spilt out together, you know.”

“Well, don’t stand talking.  You mustn’t keep them waiting.  It isn’t time to speak about tea, yet.  Look over the album, and get at some music. Keep them without saying anything about it.  When people think every minute they are just going, is just when they are having the very pleasantest time.”

“I know it.  But you’ll come, won’t you, and make it all right?  Put on something loose and cool; that lovely black lace jacket with the violet lining, and your gray silk skirt.  It won’t take you a minute.  Your hair’s perfectly sweet now.”  And Sylvie hurried away.

Mrs. Argenter came down, twenty minutes afterwards, into the great summer drawing-room, where the finest Indian matting, and dark, rich Persian rugs, and inner window blinds folded behind lace curtains that fell like the foam of waterfalls from ceiling to floor, made a pleasantness out of the very heat against which such furnishings might be provided.

In her silken skirt of silver gray, and the llama sack, violet lined, to need no tight corsage beneath, her fair wrists and arms showing white and cool in the wide drapery sleeves, she looked a very lovely lady.  Sylvie was proud of her handsome, elegant mother.  She grew a great deal braver always when Mrs. Argenter came in.  She borrowed a second consciousness from her in which she took courage, assured that all was right.  Chairs and rugs gave her no such confidence, though she knew that the Sherretts themselves had no more faultless surroundings.  Anybody could have rugs and chairs.  It was the presence among them that was wanted; and poor Sylvie seemed to herself to melt quite away, as it were, before such a girl as Amy Sherrett, and not to be able to be a presence at all.

It was all right now, as Sylvie had said.  They could not leave immediately upon Mrs. Argenter joining them and her joining them was of itself a welcome and an invitation.  So Sylvie called upon her mother to admire the lovely basket, wherein on damp, tender, bright green moss, clustered the most exquisite blossoms, and the most delicate trails of stem and leafage wandered and started up lightly, and at last fell like a veil over rim and handle, and dropped below the edge of the tiny round table with Siena marble top, on which Sylvie had placed it between the curtains of the recess that led through to their conservatory, which had been “a failure this year.”