themselves to needle-work. Irene spent her abundant
leisure in shopping for herself and her mother, of whom
both daughters made a kind of idol, buying her caps
and laces out of their pin-money, and getting her dresses
far beyond her capacity to wear. Irene dressed herself
very stylishly, and spent hours on her toilet every day.
Her sister had a simpler taste, and, if she had done
altogether as she liked, might even have slighted dress.
They all three took long naps every day, and sat hours
together minutely discussing what they saw out of the window.
In her self-guided search for self-improvement, the elder
sister went to many church lectures on a vast variety
of secular subjects, and usually came home with a comic
account of them, and that made more matter of talk for the
whole family. She could make fun of nearly everything;
Irene complained that she scared away the young men whom
they got acquainted with at the dancing-school sociables.
They were, perhaps, not the wisest young men.

The girls had learned to dance at Papanti's; but they had
not belonged to the private classes. They did not even know
of them, and a great gulf divided them from those who did.
Their father did not like company, except such as came
informally in their way; and their mother had remained
too rustic to know how to attract it in the sophisticated
city fashion. None of them had grasped the idea of
European travel; but they had gone about to mountain
and sea-side resorts, the mother and the two girls,
where they witnessed the spectacle which such resorts
present throughout New England, of multitudes of girls,