Up to a certain period
Mrs. Lapham had the ladies of her neighbourhood in to tea,
as her mother had done in the country in her younger days.
Lapham's idea of hospitality was still to bring a
heavy-buying customer home to pot-luck; neither of them
imagined dinners.
Their two girls had gone to the public schools, where they
had not got on as fast as some of the other girls;
so that they were a year behind in graduating from the
grammar-school, where Lapham thought that they had got
education enough. His wife was of a different mind;
she would have liked them to go to some private school
for their finishing. But Irene did not care for study;
she preferred house-keeping, and both the sisters were
afraid of being snubbed by the other girls, who were of
a different sort from the girls of the grammar-school;
these were mostly from the parks and squares, like themselves.
It ended in their going part of a year. But the elder
had an odd taste of her own for reading, and she took some
private lessons, and read books out of the circulating library;
the whole family were amazed at the number she read,
and rather proud of it.
They were not girls who embroidered or abandoned
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.
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