The Other Girls | Page 6

her mother and others like her talk vernacular every day. It
was a wonder she shaded off from it as delicately as she did.
Ray Ingraham, or Rachel,--for that was her name, and her sister's was
Dorothy, though these had been shortened into two as charming, pet
little appellatives as could have been devised by the most elegant
intention,--was a pretty girl, with her long-lashed, quick-glancing dark
eyes, her hair, that crimped naturally and fell off in 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