parlors, and yet never gets into them herself.

[Illustration]

Leslie would not have asked her to be Jennie Wren, because she really
has a lame foot; but when they told her about it, she said right off,
"O, how I wish I could be that!" She has not only the lame foot, but
the wonderful "golden bower" of sunshiny hair too; and she knows the
doll's dressmaker by heart; she says she expects to find her some
time, if ever she goes to England--or to heaven. Truly she was up to
the "tricks and the manners" of the occasion; nobody entered into it
with more self-abandonment than she; she was so completely Jennie Wren
that no one--at the moment--thought of her in any other character, or
remembered their rules of behaving according to the square of the
distance. She "took patterns" of Mrs. Lewis Marchbanks's trimmings to
her very face; she readied up behind Mrs. Linceford, and measured the
festoon of her panier. There was no reason why she should be afraid or
abashed; Maddy Freeman is a little lady, only she is poor, and a
genius. She stepped right _out_ of Dickens's story, not _into_ it, as
the rest of us did; neither did she even seem to step consciously into
the grand Pennington house; all she did as to that was to go "up
here," or "over there," and "be dead," as fresh, new-world delights
attracted her. Lizzie Hexam went too; they belonged together; and
T'other Governor would insist on following after them, and being
comfortably dead also, though Society was behind him, and the
Veneerings and the Podsnaps looking on. Mrs. Ingleside did not provide
any Podsnaps or Veneerings; she said they would be there.

Now Eugene Wrayburn was Doctor John Hautayne; for this was only our
fourth evening. Nobody had anything to say about parts, except the