“Cherry—­this is the nicest thing that has happened for a long, long while!” he said.

“You and Alix are angels to let me come!” Cherry answered, as they turned, and with laughter and eager, interrupted talking went back to the house.

“And how do you think your big sister looks?”

“Oh, Alix is wonderful!” Cherry said.  Indeed she had been looking at Alix with secret surprise and admiration since her arrival.  Alix had always been different from Cherry, but in her own way she was amazing.  Where Cherry had but one expensive waist, but one beautiful gown, but two or three elaborate sets of filmy lingerie, accumulated slowly and laundered by herself when she washed her silk stockings, Alix, like a child, changed her fresh, simple linen every day, jumped from one crisp tub suit to another, wore untrimmed straw hats that she bought in the village for fifty cents apiece.  Alix apparently never considered the relation of her clothing to her own personality; she simply chose the simple colours and styles she liked, and aspired only to be always fresh and trim.

So with her house.  She did not have one or two priceless tablecloths to be used on occasions with satin underlaid, and crystal and cut-glass; her china was all used every day, and her table linen cheap and plentiful and lavish.  Meals were always simple and hearty and delicious; but Alix had not time for fancy touches; hated, as she frankly admitted, “all that stuffed celery and chopped nut and halved cherry business!  If soup isn’t good without whipped cream and sherry in it, it’s pretty poor soup!”

Cherry had laughed at her, even years ago, for her point of view, but sometimes she had felt it to be almost an advantage.  At all events, she had not been twenty-four hours in Alix’s house without perceiving that her sister was singularly free and unruffled, unlike the women of her generation.  Alix did not put all the time she saved to good use, although she puttered away in the garden, spent an hour or two each day at the piano, and was, as she confided to Cherry, writing a novel.  But she was always gay and always fresh, and enjoyed every moment of the day.

Four years younger, yet Cherry felt older than she.  Alix’s nature was uncomplicated by any consciousness of self.  Again like a child, she only wanted people to love each other and be happy, and that the sun should shine.  She was equally content, whether she was helping Peter to pile wood, tramping in the deluging summer rains, or dreaming over a book through the long evenings, with her shabby slippers to the fire.  An exquisite spring morning, with wet earth, rising mists, and shafts of pure, warm sunlight, made her sing like the forest birds all about her, but even on the coldest and blackest of winter nights, when the storm made the lamp-light fluctuate alarmingly, and trees creaked over the cabin, she would look up from the piano to say contentedly:  “Well, I’d rather be here than anywhere else, anyway!”