d left the flat farming country now, and turned northward, up the
beautiful river valley. There was plenty to enjoy outside; and it was
growing more and more lovely with almost every mile. They left the great
towns gradually behind; each succeeding one seemed more simply rural.
Young girls were gathered on the platforms at the little stations where
they stopped sometimes; it was the grand excitement of the place,--the
coming of the train,--and to these village lasses was what the piazzas
or the springs are to gay dwellers at Saratoga.

By dinner-time they steamed up to the stately back staircase of the
"Pemigewasset." In the little parlor where they smoothed their hair and
rested a moment before going to the dining-hall, they met again the lady
of the grass-grown bonnet. She took this off, making herself
comfortable, in her primitive fashion, for dinner; and then Leslie
noticed how little it was from any poverty of nature that the fair and
abundant hair, at least, had not been made use of to take down the
severe primness of her outward style. It did take it down in spite of
all, the moment the gray straw was removed. The great round coil behind
was all real and _solid_, though it was wound about with no thought save
of security, and fastened with a buffalo-horn comb. Hair was a matter of
course; the thing was, to keep it out of the way; that was what the
fashion of this head expressed, and nothing more. Where it was tucked
over the small ears,--and native refinement or the other thing shows
very plainly in the ears,--it lay full, and shaped into a soft curve.
She was only plain, not ugly, after all; and they are very different
things,--there being a beauty of plainness in men and women, as there is
in a rich fabric, sometimes.

While Leslie was noticing these things, Elinor Hadden stood by a window
with her back to the others. She did not complain at first; one doesn't
like to allow, at once, that the toothache, or a mischance like this
that had happened to her, is an established fact,--one is in for it the
moment one does that. But she had got a cinder in her eye; and though
she had winked, and stared, and rolled her eyelid under, and tried all
the approved and instinctive means, it seemed persistent; and she was
forced at last, just as her party was going in to dinner, to acknowledge
that this traveler's misery had befallen her, and to make up her mind
to the pain and wretchedness and ugliness of it for hours, if not