learn."

Leslie need not have been ashamed, and I don't think in her heart she
was, of the fresh, white, light-lying piles that had already begun to
make promise of filling a drawer, which she drew out as she answered
Cousin Delight's question.

The fine-lined gathers; the tiny dots of stitches that held them to
their delicate bindings; the hems and tucks, true to a thread, and
dotted with the same fairy needle dimples (no machine-work, but all
real, dainty finger-craft); the bits of ruffling peeping out from the
folds, with their edges in almost invisible whip-hems; and here and
there a finishing of lovely, lace-like crochet, done at odd minutes, and
for "visiting work,"--there was something prettier and more precious,
really, in all this than in the imported fineries which had come,
without labor and without thought, to her friends the Haddens. Besides,
there were the pleasant talks and readings of the winter evenings, all
threaded in and out, and associated indelibly with every seam. There was
the whole of "David Copperfield," and the beginning of "Our Mutual
Friend," ruffled up into the night-dresses; and some of the crochet was
beautiful with the rhymed pathos of "Enoch Arden," and some with the
poetry of the "Wayside Inn;" and there were places where stitches had
had to be picked out and done over, when the eye grew dim and the hand
trembled while the great war news was being read.

Leslie loved it, and had a pride in it all; it was not, truly and only,
humiliation and disgust at self-comparison with the Haddens, but some
other and unexplained doubt which moved her now, and which was stirred
often by this, or any other of the objects and circumstances of her
life, and which kept her standing there with her hand upon the