But all these excitements were become as nothing. A new occupation presented itself. A dozen times a day now I had to watch through the fence-cracks, or through the knot-hole, or boldly between the pickets of the front fence, at the fascinating performances of the New Boy and his troops of friends. At any moment both Mary Elizabeth and I would abandon what we were doing to go to stare at the unaccountable activities which were forever agitating them. They were always producing something from their pockets and examining it, with their heads together, or manufacturing something or burying something, or disputing about something unguessed and alluring. Their whole world was filled with doing, doing, doing, whereas ours was made wholly of watching things get done. On an afternoon Mary Elizabeth and I were playing together in our side yard. It was the day for Delia’s music lesson, and as she usually did her whole week’s practising in the time immediately preceding that event, the entire half day was virtually wasted. We could hear her going drearily over and over the first and last movements of “At Home,” which she had memorized and could play like lightning, while the entire middle of the piece went with infinite deliberation. Calista was, we understood (because of some matter pertaining to having filled the bath-tub and waded in it and ruined the dining-room ceiling), spending the day in her bed. And Margaret Amelia and Betty Rodman were being kept at home because the family had company; and such was the prestige of the Rodmans that the two contrived to make this circumstance seem enviable, and the day before had pictured to us their embroidered white dresses and blue ribbons, and blue stockings, and the Charlotte Russe for supper, until we felt left out, and not in the least as if their company were of a kind with events of the sort familiar to us. Since I have grown up, I have observed this variety of genius in others. There is one family which, when it appears in afternoon gowns on occasions when I have worn a street dress, has power to make me wonder how I can have failed to do honour to the day; but who, when they wear street gowns and I am dressed for afternoon, invariably cause me to feel inexcusably overdressed. It is a kind of genius for the fit, and we must believe that it actually designates the atmosphere which an occasion shall breathe.