You'd better go and sit down." "It won't hurt my dress any." Charlotte glanced down half scornfully at her purple skirt.

It had lost all its glory for her.

She was not even sure that Barney had seen it.
"Set down.

I've got breakfast 'most ready," Sylvia said, again, more peremptorily than she was wont, and Charlotte sat down in the hollow-backed cherry rocking-chair beside the kitchen window, leaned her head back, and looked out indifferently between the lilac-bushes.
The bushes were full of pinkish-purple buds.

Sylvia's front yard reached the road in a broad slope, and the ground was hard, and green with dampness under the shade of a great elm-tree.