The Other Girls | Page 6

a deep, soft shadow from her temples, her little mouth, neatly dimpled in, and the gypsy glow of her clear, bright skin. Dot was different: she was dark too, not so dark; her eyes were full, brilliant gray, with thick, short lashes; she was round and comfortable: nose, cheeks, chin, neck, waist, hands; her mouth was large, with white teeth that showed easily and broadly, instead of, like Ray's, with just a quiver and a glimmer. She was like her mother. She looked the smart, buxom, common-sense village girl to perfection. Ray had the hint of something higher and more delicate about her, though she had the trigness, and readiness, and every-day-ness too.
Sylvie sat silent after this, and looked at her, wondering, more than she had wondered about the furniture. Thinking, "how many girls there were in the world! All sorts--everywhere! What did they all do, and find to care for?" These were not the "other" girls of whom her mother had blandly said that she could show kindnesses by taking them to drive. Those were such as Aggie Townsend, the navy captain's widow's daughter,--nice, but poor; girls whom everybody noticed, of course, but who hadn't it in their power to notice anybody. That made such a difference! These were otherer yet! And for all that they were girls,--girls! Ever so much of young life, and glow, and companionship, ever so much of dream, and hope, and possible story, is in just that little plural of five letters. A company of girls! Heaven only knows what there is not represented, and suggested, and foreshadowed there!
Sylvie Argenter, with all her nonsense, had a way of putting herself, imaginatively, into other people's places. She used to tell her mother, when she was a little child and said her hymns,--which Mrs. Argenter, not having any very fresh, instant spiritual life, I am afraid, out of which to feed her child, chose for her in dim remembrance of what had been thought good for herself when she was little,--that she "didn't know exactly as she did 'thank the goodness and the grace that on her birth had smiled.'" She "should like pretty well to have been a little--Lapland girl with a sledge; or--a Chinese; or--a kitchen girl; a little while, I mean!"
She had a way of intimacy with the servants which Mrs. Argenter found it hard to check. She liked to get into Jane's room when she was "doing herself up" of an afternoon, and look over her cheap little treasures in her band-box and chest-drawer. She made especial love to a carnelian heart, and a twisted gold ring with two clasped hands on it.
"I think it's real nice to have only two or three things, and to 'clean yourself up,' and to have a 'Sunday out!'" she said.
Mrs. Argenter was anxiously alarmed at the child's low tastes. Yet these were very practicably compatible with the alternations of importance in being driven about in her father's barouche, taking Aggie Townsend up on the road, and "setting her down at the small gray house."
Sylvie thought, this afternoon, looking at Ray Ingraham, in her striped lilac and white calico, with its plaited waist and cross-banded, machine-stitched double skirt, sitting by her shady window, beyond which, behind the garden angle, rose up the red brick wall of the bakehouse, whence came a warm, sweet smell of many new-drawn loaves,--looking around within, at the snug tidiness of the simple room, and even out at the street close by, with its stir and curious interest, yet seen from just as real a shelter as she had in her own chamber at home,--that it might really be nice to be a baker's daughter and live in the village,--"when it wasn't your own fault, and you couldn't help it."
Ray nodded to some one out of her window.
Sylvie saw a bright color come up in her cheeks, and a sparkle into her eyes as she did so, while a little smile, that she seemed to think was all to herself, crept about her mouth and lingered at the dimpled corners. There was an expression as if she hid herself quite away in some consciousness of her own, from any recollection of the strange girl sitting by.
The strange girl glanced from her window, and saw a young carpenter with his box of tools go past under the elm, with some sort of light subsiding also in like manner from his face. He was in his shirt sleeves,--but the sleeves were white,--and his straw hat was pushed back from his forehead, about which brown curls lay damp with heat. Sylvie did not believe he had even touched his hat, when he had looked up through the friendly elm boughs and bowed to the village girl in her shady corner. His hands were full, of