“You certainly forget the Sherretts.”

“No, I don’t.  But I never got hold of them much while I was just edging alongside.  I think some people grasp hands the better for a little space to reach across.  You mayn’t be born quite in the purple, as Susan Nipper would say, but it isn’t any reason you should try to pinch yourself black and blue.  I’ve got all over it, and I like the russet a great deal better.  I wish you could.”

“I can’t begin again,” said Mrs. Argenter.  “My life is torn up by the roots, and there is the end of it.”

It was true.  Sylvie felt that it was so, as her mother spoke, and she reproached herself for her own light content.  How could her mother make intimacy with Mrs. Knoxwell, the old blacksmith’s wife, or Mrs. Pevear, the carriage-painter’s?  Or even good, homely Mrs. Ingraham, over the bake-shop?  It is so much easier for girls to come together; girls of this day, especially, who in all classes get so much more of the same things than their mothers did.

Sylvie, authorized by this feeble acquiescence in what made “no difference,” went on with her intention of having Ray Ingraham for her intimate friend.  She spent many an hour, as the summer wore away, at the time in the afternoon when Mrs. Argenter was always lying down, in the pleasant bedroom over the shop, that looked out under the elm-tree.  This was Ray Ingraham’s leisure also; the bread carts did not come in till tea time, with their returns and orders; the day’s second baking was in the oven; she had an hour or two of quiet between the noon business and the night; then she was always glad to see Sylvie Argenter come down the street with her little purple straw work-basket swinging from her forefinger, or a book in her hand.  Sylvie and Ray read new books together from the Dorbury library, and old ones from Mrs. Argenter’s book-shelves.  Dot was not so often with them; her leisure was given more to her flower beds, where all sorts of blooms,—­bright petunias and verbenas, delicate sweet peas and golden lantanas, scarlet bouvardias and snowy deutzias, fairy, fragrant jessamines, white and crimson and rose-tinted fuchsias with their purple hearts, and pansies, poised on their light stems, in every rich color, like beautiful winged things half alighted in a great fluttering flock,—­made a glory and a sweetness in the modest patch of ground between the grape-trellised wall of the house-end and the bricks of the bakery, against which grew, appropriately enough, some strings of hop vines.

“I think it is just the nicest place in the world,” said Sylvie, in her girlish, unqualified speech, as they all stood there one evening, while Dot was cutting a bouquet for Sylvie’s mother.  “People that set out to have everything beautiful, get the same things over and over; graveled drives and a smooth lawn, and trees put into groups tidily, and circles and baskets of flowers, and a view, perhaps, of a village away off, or a piece of the harbor, or