Barbara got up some of her special cookery in these days. Not her very finest, out of Miss Leslie; she said that was too much like the fox and the crane, when Lucilla asked for the receipts. It wasn't fair to give a taste of things that we ourselves could only have for very best, and send people home to wish for them. But she made some of her "griddles trimmed with lace," as only Barbara's griddles were trimmed; the brown lightness running out at the edges into crisp filigree. And another time it was the flaky spider-cake, turned just as it blushed golden-tawny over the coals; and then it was breakfast potato, beaten almost frothy with one white-of-egg, a pretty good bit of butter, a few spoonfuls of top-of-the-milk, and seasoned plentifully with salt, and delicately with pepper,--the oven doing the rest, and turning it into a snowy soufflé. Barbara said we had none of us a specialty; she knew better; only hers was a very womanly and old-fashioned, not to say kitcheny one; and would be quite at a discount when the grand co-operative kitchens should come into play; for who cares to put one's genius into the universal and indiscriminate mouth, or make potato-soufflés to be carried half a mile to the table? Barbara delighted to "make company" of seamstress week; "it was so nice," she said, "to entertain somebody who thought 'chickings was 'evingly.'" Rosamond liked that part of it; she enjoyed giving pleasure no less than any; but she had a secret misgiving that we were being very vulgarly comfortable in an underhand way. She would never, by any means, go off by herself to eat with her fingers. Delia Waite said she never came to our house that she did not get some new ideas to carry home to Arabel. Arabel Waite was fifty years old, or more; she was the oldest child of one marriage and Delia the youngest of another. All the Waites between them had dropped away,--out of the world, or into homes here and there of their own,--and Arabel and Delia were left together in the square, low, gambrel-roofed house over on the other hill, where the town ran up small. Arabel Waite was an old dressmaker. She _could_ make two skirts to a dress, one shorter, the other longer; and she could cut out the upper one by any new paper pattern; and she could make shell-trimmings and flutings and box-plaitings and flouncings, and sew them on exquisitely, even now, with her old eyes; but she never had adapted herself to the modern ideas of the corsage. She could not fit a bias to save her life; she could only stitch up a straight slant, and leave the rest to nature and fate. So all her people had the squarest of wooden fronts, and were preternaturally large around the waist. Delia sewed with her, abroad and at home,--abroad without her, also, as she was doing now for us. A pattern for a sleeve, or a cape, or a panier,--or a receipt for a tea-biscuit or a johnny-cake, was something to go home with rejoicing.