us a specialty; she knew better; only hers
was a very womanly and old-fashioned, not to say kitcheny one; and
would be quite at a discount when the grand co-operative kitchens
should come into play; for who cares to put one's genius into the
universal and indiscriminate mouth, or make potato-souffles to be
carried half a mile to the table?

Barbara delighted to "make company" of seamstress week; "it was so
nice," she said, "to entertain somebody who thought 'chickings was
'evingly.'"

Rosamond liked that part of it; she enjoyed giving pleasure no less
than any; but she had a secret misgiving that we were being very
vulgarly comfortable in an underhand way. She would never, by any
means, go off by herself to eat with her fingers.

Delia Waite said she never came to our house that she did not get some
new ideas to carry home to Arabel.

Arabel Waite was fifty years old, or more; she was the oldest child of
one marriage and Delia the youngest of another. All the Waites between
them had dropped away,--out of the world, or into homes here and there
of their own,--and Arabel and Delia were left together in the square,
low, gambrel-roofed house over on the other hill, where the town ran
up small.

Arabel Waite was an old dressmaker. She _could_ make two skirts to a
dress, one shorter, the other longer; and she could cut out the upper
one by any new paper pattern; and she could make shell-trimmings and
flutings and box-plaitings and flouncings, and sew them on
exquisitely, even now, with her old eyes; but she never had adapted
herself to the modern ideas of the corsage. She could not fit a bias
to save her life; she could only stitch up a straight slant, and leave
the rest to nature and fate. So all her people had the squarest of
wooden fronts, and were preternaturally large around the waist. Delia
sewed with her, abroad and at home,--abroad without her, also, as she
was doing now for us. A pattern for a sleeve, or a cape, or a
panier,--or a receipt for a tea-biscuit or a johnny-cake, was
something to go home with rejoicing.

Arabel Waite and Delia could only use three rooms of the old house;
the rest was blinded and shut up; the garret was given over to the
squirrels, who came in from the great butternut-trees in the yard, and
stowed away their rich provision under the eaves and away down between
the walls, and grew fat there all winter, and frolicked like a troop
of horse. We liked to hear Delia tell of their pranks,