But the best day of all was rose day. Before it arrived she had always ready a posy of poems from Keats, Wordsworth, Jean Ingelow, and Whittier, and read them in the morning while the dew was on the world. The Baldwin girls cultivated a great many roses. Rilla could hardly miss from her rose-water and home-made attar and rose preserves the heaps which Infant cut for her nonsense. There was not a nicer day in the year than rose day, if Rilla would only abstain from boiling soap on that date. The sisters had inherited seventy-five thousand dollars apiece, but they made their own soap every spring of refuse fats and the lye of wood-ashes. It could have been made cold in the cellar, if that way had not been too easy for Rilla. She held it a movable festival, like rose day, and no one will ever gauge the degree of satisfaction she felt in haling her flower-wreathed sister up to the vile-smelling caldron to keep the stirrer going while she set about other duties. Rilla honored pioneer custom and her grandmother’s memory by performing her soap incantations in the oldest, mouldiest, most completely shattered garment she possessed. This was a red wool delaine, so abased from its ruby tone that the drippings of the lye gourd could find little remaining space to burn or spot. They boiled soap in a huge iron kettle in the chip yard. The blue wood smoke would envelop Rilla and her tarnished tatters as she ladled and tested, until she looked witch-like to passers along the road. Her unhappy victim, the slim woman in gray, with a rope of roses wound spirally around her from head to foot, a burden of roses on her bosom, and roses studded thickly along the band of her hat, sat on the corded wood as far as Rilla would allow from the soap, alternately inhaling their odor and rejecting the alkali steam. If Infant had to stir the soap, she would have a long-handled stirrer. The hot sun, beating on the chip yard and her huge hat, smote also the roses, and amidst their dying fragrance she had sad thoughts on the disappointments of life. So there was nothing but the morning of rose day which Rilla did not spoil. But this anniversary Infant felt a sudden uplifting of courage within herself when her twin announced the soap orgy. “_My_ soap-boiling will not come any more on rose day,” she put forth strongly. “And I think I will pay Enos Robb’s wife to make up my share of the fat and lye after this, Rilla.” “I would,” said Rilla sarcastically, “particularly as Enos Robb and his wife and children don’t batten on us already. Give them the piano and the best parlor chairs and the solid coffee service while you are about it.”