"You can lead a horse to water, you know, Frank, but you can't make
him drink. And the colts are forty times worse. I believe you might
get some of the mothers together for an ancient tea-drink, just in
the name of old association; but the _babies_ would all turn up
their new-fashioned little noses."

"O, dear!" sighed Frau Van Winkle. "I wish I knew people!"

"By the time you do, you'll know the reason why, and be like all the
rest."

Hazel Ripwinkley went to Mrs. Hilman's school, with her cousin
Helena. That was because the school was a thoroughly good one; the
best her mother could learn of; not because it was kept in parlors
in Dorset Street, and there were girls there who came from palaces
west of the Common, in the grand avenues and the ABC streets; nor
did Hazel wear her best gray and black velvet suit for every day,
though the rich colored poplins with their over-skirts and sashes,
and the gay ribbons for hair and neck made the long green baize
covered tables look like gardenplots with beds of bloom, and quite
extinguished with their brilliancy the quiet, one skirted brown
merino that she brushed and folded every night, and put on with
fresh linen cuffs and collar every morning.

"It is an idiosyncrasy of Aunt Frances," Helena explained, with the
grandest phrase she could pick out of her "Synonymes," to cow down
those who "wondered."

Privately, Helena held long lamentations with Hazel, going to and
fro, about the party that she could not have.