nor her mother had known how far their comfort and acquiescence in
their new life had depended on the "backing up" of the Sherretts.
This they found out when the Sherretts went away that autumn. Amy
was married in October and sailed for England; Rodney was at
Cambridge, and when the country house at Roxeter was closed, Miss
Euphrasia took rooms in Boston for the winter, where her winter work
all lay, and Mr. Sherrett, who was a Representative to Congress,
went to Washington for the session. There were no more calls; no
more pleasant spending of occasional days at the Sherrett Place; no
more ridings round and droppings in of Rodney at the village. All
that seemed suddenly broken up and done with, almost hopelessly.
Sylvie could not see how it was ever to begin again. Next year
Rodney was to graduate, and his father was to take him abroad. These
plans had come out in the talks over Amy's marriage and her leaving
home.

Sylvie was left to her village; she could only go in to the Miss
Goodwyns and down to the bakery; and now that her condescensions
were unlinked from those of Miss Kirkbright, and just dropped into
next-door matter of course, Mrs. Argenter fretted. Marion Kent would
come calling, too, and talk about Mrs. Browning, and borrow
patterns, and ask Sylvie "how she hitched up her Marguerite."

[In case this story should ever be read after the fashion I allude
to shall have disappeared from the catalogues of Butterick and
Demorest, to be never more mentioned or remembered, I will explain
that it is a style of upper dress most eminently un-daisy-like in
expression and effect, and reminding of no field simplicities
whatsoever, unless possibly of a hay-load; being so very much
pitch-forked up into heaps behind.]

Not that Sylvie dressed herself with a pitchfork; she had been
growing more sensible than that for a long time, to say nothing of
her quiet mourning; though for that matter, I have seen bombazine
and crape so voluminously bundled and massed as to remind one of the
slang phrase "piling on the agony." But Marion Kent came to Sylvie
for the first idea of her light loops and touches: then she
developed it, as her sort do, tremendously; she did grandly by the
yard, what Sylvie Argenter did modestly by the quarter; she had a
soul beyond mere nips and pinches. But this was small vexation, to
be caricatured by Miss Kent. Sylvie's real troubles came closer and
harder.

Sabina Bowen went away.

She had not mea