"Please, father," she protested, laughing. "Do go along into the sun."
She gently pushed him toward the door. Rhoda realized the fact that
William was more than half Whig already. That threatened still another
point of difference, of departure, from all that his father held to be
sacred necessities. Jeremy, like most of the older shipmasters, was a
bitter Federalist, an upholder of a strongly centralized autocratic
government. He left, grumbling, and the staccato commands of the military
evolutions on the Common rang through the slumberous afternoon.

She lingered in the doorway and Laurel appeared, jigging with excitement.

"Can't I get nearer," she begged; "there's nothing to see from here." Her
mother replied, "Ask Camilla to take you over to the Square." Camilla
appeared indifferently. "I don't know why anyone should be flustered,"
she observed; "it isn't like the Fourth of July with a concert and
fireworks."

As they were going, Sidsall came out in a white tarlatan dress worked
with sprays of yellow barley, her face glowing with color, and sat on
the steps. "Positively," her mother said, looking down on the mass of
bright chestnut hair in a chenille net, "we'll soon have to have you up
in braids."

"I wish I might," she responded. "And Hodie is too silly--I can't
get her to lace me tightly enough. She says such things are engines
of the devil."

"It's still a little soon for that--" Rhoda broke off as a slight erect
man at the verge of middle age turned in from Pleasant Street upon them.