The sun would be going down now, in a little while; then the cool piazzas, and the raspberries and cream, and the iced milk,--yellow Alderney milk,--would be delightful. Once or twice she did think of "Argie" in New York,--gone thither on some perplexing, hurried errand, which he had only half told her, and the half telling of which she had only half heard,--and remembered that the heat must be "awful" there. But to-night he would be on board the splendid Sound steamer, coming home; and to-morrow, if this lasted, she would surely speak to him about getting off for a while to Rye, or Mount Desert. She came by and by to the end of her volume, and found that the serial she was following ran on into the next. "Provoking," she said, tossing it down to the end of the sofa, "and neither Sylvie nor I can get into town in this heat, and Argie thinks it such a bother to be asked to go to Loring's." Just then Sylvie's step came lightly up the stairs. She looked into the large cool dressing-room where her mother lay. "I'm only up for my 'Confession Album'," she said. "But O Mater Amata! if you'd just come down and help me through! I know they'd stay to tea and go home in the cool, if I only knew how to ask them; but if I said a word I should be sure to drive them away. _You_ can do it; and they would if you came. Please do!" "You silly child! Won't you ever be able to do anything yourself? When you were a little girl, you wouldn't carry a message, because you could get into a house, but didn't know how to get out! And now you are grown up, you can get people into the house to see you, but you don't know how to ask them to stay to tea! What _shall_ I ever do with you?" "I don't know. I'm awfully afraid of--_nice_ girls!" "Sylvie, I'm ashamed of you! As if you had any other kind of acquaintance, or weren't as nice as any of them! I wouldn't suggest it, even to myself, if I were you." "And I don't," said Sylvie boldly--"when I'm _by_ myself. But there's a kind of a little misgiving somehow, when they come, or when I go, as if--well, as if there _might_ be something to it that I didn't know of, or behind it that I hadn't got; or else, that there were things that they had nothing to do with that I know too much of. A kind of a--Poggowantimoc feeling, mother! Amy Sherrett is so _fearfully_ refined,--all the way through! It doesn't seem as if she ever had any common things to say or do. Don't you think it _takes_ common things to get people really near to each other? It doesn't seem to me I could ever be intimate--or very easy--with Amy Sherrett." "You seemed to get on well enough with her brother, the other day." "Boys aren't half so bad. There isn't any such wax-work about boys. Besides,"--and Sylvie laughed a low, gay little laugh,--we got spilt out together, you know."