The summer boarders had gone, and Marshmead was settling down to a peace enhanced by affluence. Though the exodus had come earlier than usual this year, because the Hiltons were sailing for Germany and the Dennys due at the Catskills, not one among their country entertainers had complained. Marshmead approved, from a careless dignity, when people brought money into the town, but it always relapsed into its own customs with a contented sigh after the jolt of inexplicable requirements and imported ways. This year had been an especially fruitful one. The boarders had given a fancy dress party with amateur vaudeville combined, for the benefit of the old church, and Martha Waterman now, as she toiled up the hill to a meeting of the Circle, held the resultant check in one of her plump freckled hands. Martha was chief mover in all capable deeds, a warm, silent woman who called children "lamb," plied them with pears, and knew the inner secrets of rich cookery. She was portly, and her thin skin gave confirmation to her own frequent complaint of feeling the heat; but [286]though the day had been more sultry than it was, she would not have foregone the pleasure of endowing the Circle with its new accession toward the meeting-house fund.

The Circle had been founded in war time when women scraped lint and sewed with a passionate zeal. Martha was a little girl then, wondering what the excitement was really about, though, since it had lasted through her own brief period, she took it that war was a permanent condition, like bread or weather. Now she often mused over those old days and thought how marvelous it was that she could ever have been young enough to see no significance in that time of blood and pain. In these middle years of hers the Circle was a different affair, but it kept its loyal being. To-day it met in the basement of the church, and there, when Martha went plodding in, nearly all the other members were assembled. Sometimes they sewed for sufferers from varying disasters, but to-day their hands were idle, and a buzz of talk saluted her. They looked up as one woman when she entered.

"There she is," called two or three, and Lydia Vesey, the little dressmaker, as sharp and unexpected as the slash of her own too-impulsive scissors, came forward with a run.

"You got it?" she inquired.

Mrs. Waterman laughed richly, and set her [287]umbrella in the corner. Then, still holding one hand closed upon the check, she untied her hat and fanned herself with it during the relief of sinking into a seat.

"Do let me get my breath," she besought, yet as if she prolonged the moment for the sake of the dramatic weight the tale demanded. "Seems if I never experienced such a day as this. It\'s hotter\'n any fall I ever see."

"You look very warm, Martha," said Ellen Bayliss, in her gentle way. She was sitting by the window, bending over an embroidered square, the sun on her soft curls and delicate cheek unveiling the look of middle life, yet doing something kindly, too; for though he showed the withered texture of her skin, he brought out the last fleck of gold in her hair, and balanced sadness with some bloom. Ellen had been accounted a beauty, and her niece Nellie was a beauty now, of a more radiant type. She was the rose of life, but aunt Ellen had the fragrance of roses in a jar.

"You sewin\', Ellen?" Martha inquired, as if she were willing to shift the topic from what would exact continued speech from her, and at least defer her colleagues\' satisfaction. "You\'re the only one that\'s brought their thimble, I\'ll be bound."

"It\'s only this same centrepiece," Ellen answered, [288]holding it up. "Mrs. Hilton told me if I\'d send it after her, she\'d give me three dollars for it. I thought I could turn the money into the fund."

"You got it?" Lydia Vesey cried again, as if she could not possibly crowd her interest under, and this time she had re?nforcements from without. Mrs. Daniel Pray, who was almost a giantess and bent laboriously over to accommodate her height to her husband\'s, took off her glasses and laid them on her declivitous lap, the better to fix Martha with her dull, small eyes.

"I\'ll be whipped if I believe you\'ve got it, after all," she offered discontentedly. "Mebbe they\'re goin\' to send by mail."

Martha looked at her a moment, apparently in polite consideration, but really wondering, as she often did, if anything would thicken the hair at Mrs. Pray\'s parting. She frequently, out of the strength of her address and capability, had these moments of musing over what could be done.

"Speak up, Marthy, can\'t ye?" ended Mrs. Pray irritably, now putting on her glasses again as if, having tried one way, she would essay another. "Didn\'t you see Mis\' Hilton at the last, or didn\'t they give it to you?"

Martha unclosed her hand and extended it to [289]them impartially, the check, face uppermost, held between thumb and finger. They bent forward to peer. Some rose and looked over the shoulders of the nearer ones, and glasses were sought and hastily mounted upon noses.

"Well, there," said Mrs. Hanscom, the wife of the grain-dealer who always stipulated for cash payment before he would deliver a bag at the barn door, "it ain\'t bills, as I see."

"It\'s just as good." Ellen Bayliss looked up from her sewing to throw this in, with her air of deprecating courtesy. "A check\'s the same as money any day. I have two, twice a year, from my stock. All you have to do is to write your name on the back and turn \'em into the bank."

"Well, all I want to know is, what\'s it come to?" Lydia Vesey said. "Course it\'s just the same as money. I\'ve had checks myself, days past. Once I done over Miss Tenny\'s black mohair an\' sent it after her, an\' she mailed me back a check,—same day, I guess it was. How much\'s it come to, Marthy?"

"See for yourself," said Martha. She laid it, still face upward, on the table. "It\'s as much yours as \'tis mine, I guess, if I be treasurer. Forty-three dollars an\' twenty-seven cents."

There was a chorused sigh.

"Well, I call that a good haul," said Ann [290]Bartlett, whose father had been sexton for thirty-eight years, and who, in consequence, looked upon herself as holding some subtly intimate relation with the church, so that when the old carpet was "auctioned off" she insisted on darning the breadths before they were put up for sale. "What money can do! Just one evenin\', an\' them few folks dressed up to kill an\' payin\' that in for their ice-cream an\' tickets at the door."

"We made the ice-cream," said Martha, as one stating a fact to be justly remembered.

"We paid ourselves in, too," said Lydia sharply. "I guess our money\'s good as anybody\'s, an\' I guess it\'ll count up as quick an\' go as fur."

"Course it will," said Martha, in a mollifying tone. "But \'tis an easy way of makin\' a dollar, just as Ann says. There they got up a fancy-dress party an\' enjoyed themselves, an\' it\'s brought in all this. \'Twa\'n\'t hard work for \'em. \'Twas a kind o\' play."

"Well, I guess they did enjoy it," said Mrs. Pray gloomily. She had settled her glasses on her nose again, and now, with her finger, went following the bows round under her hair, to be sure they "canted right." "I guess they wouldn\'t ha\' done it if they hadn\'t."

"There\'s one thing Mis\' Hilton says to me when she passed me the check," Martha brought [291]out, in sudden recollection. "\'Now here\'s this money we made for you,\' she says. \'Use it anyways you want, so \'s you use it for the church. But,\' she says, \'why don\'t you make up your minds now you\'ll give some kind of an entertainment after we\'re gone, a harvest festival,\' she says, \'or the like o\' that? Then you could do your paintin\',\' she says, \'an\' get you a new melodeon for the Sunday School, or whatever \'tis you want. We\'ve showed you the way,\' she says. \'Now you go ahead an\' see what you can do.\'"

Lydia Vesey looked as if she might, in another instant, cap the suggestion by a satirical climax, and Ellen Bayliss rested her sewing hand on her knee and glanced thoughtfully about as if to ask, in her still, earnest way, what her own part could be in such an enterprise. But a step came hurrying down the stairs, the step of a heavy body lightly carried, and Caddie Musgrave came in at a flying pace. It was Caddie who, with the help of her silent husband, kept the big boarding-house on the hill. No need to talk to her about summer boarders, she was wont to say. She knew \'em, egg an\' bird. Take \'em as folks an\' nobody was better, but \'twas boarders she meant. They might seem different, fust sight, but shake \'em up in a peck measure, an\' you couldn\'t tell t\'other from which.

[292]"I guess you\'re tired," said Ellen Bayliss, in her gentle fashion, taking a stolen glance from the embroidery and returning again at once to her careful stitches.

"Tired!" said Caddie. She dropped into a chair and leaned her head back with ostentatious weariness. "I guess I be. An\' yet I told Charlie \'fore they went I never\'d say I was tired again in all my born days, only let me get rid of \'em this time."

"How\'d you manage with \'em this season?" asked Mrs. Pray, as if her question concerned the importation of some alien plant.

Caddie opened her eyes and came to a posture more adapted to sustaining her end of the conversational burden.

"Why, they\'re all right," she owned, "good as gold, take \'em on their own ground. I found out they were good as gold that winter I went up an\' passed Sunday with Mis\' Denny. But take \'em together, boardin\', an\' what one don\'t think of t\'other will. This summer \'twas growin\' fleshy, an\' if they didn\'t harp on that one string—well, suz!"

Mrs. Pray nodded her head solemnly.

"I said that," she returned. "I said that to Jonathan when I come home from the Circle the day they was here talkin\' over the fund an\' settlin\' what they\'d do. I come home an\' says to [293]Jonathan wipin\' his hands on the roller-towel there by the back door, I says, \'What\'s everybody got ag\'inst growin\' old, an\' growin\' hefty, too, for that matter?\' I says. \'Seems if folks don\'t talk about nothin\' else.\'"

Martha put in her assuaging word.

"Well, I guess human natur\' ain\'t changed much. I guess nobody ever hankered after gettin\' stiff j\'ints an\' losin\' their eyesight an\' so. \'Twould be a queer kind of a shay that was lookin\' for\'ard to goin\' to pieces while \'twas travelin\' along. Mis\' Denny\'s niece that reads in public read me that piece once. I thought \'twas about the cutest that ever was."

Ellen Bayliss had laid her sewing on her knee, and now she looked up in an impulsive haste, the color in her cheeks and a quick moving note in her voice.

"It isn\'t growing old that\'s the trouble. It\'s talking about it. Why, the night after that meeting of the Circle—" She stopped here, and her eyes, widening and growing darker in a way they had, gave her face almost a look of terror.

"What is it, Ellen?" asked Martha Waterman kindly. "You tell it right out."

"Why," said Ellen, "this is all \'twas. That night at supper, my Nellie kept staring at me across the table. \'What is \'t, Nellie?\' I says, at last. Then she colored up and says, not as if she [294]wanted to, but as if she couldn\'t help it, \'I hope I shall look like you sometime, aunt Ellen.\' You see how \'twas. She meant, when she was old. She never in her life had thought anything about me being old, and they\'d put it into her head."

A pained look settled upon her face, and before she took up her sewing again she glanced from one to another as if to ask them if they really understood. There was a little warm murmur of assent. Ellen was beloved, and there was, besides, a concurrent strain of sympathy through the assembly who had known all her past. They remembered how Colonel Hadley had "gone with her" awhile when she was teaching school at District Number Four, and how Ellen had faded out, the summer he was married to Kate Leighton, of the Leightons on the hill. Now his nephew, Clyde, was going with Ellen\'s niece in a way that vividly mirrored the old time, and they had heard that the colonel, when he came for one of his brief visits in the summer, had somehow put a check to love\'s beginning. At least, Clyde had seen Nellie only once after his uncle went away, and had speedily closed the old house and followed him.

"There, Ellen," said Lydia Vesey, from a rare softness. "I guess nobody\'d ever say \'t you was growin\' old. They\'d only think you was [295]sort o\' palin\' out, that\'s all, same \'s a white dress is different from a pink one."

"Well, now, I\'ll say my say, an\' done with it," remarked Caddie Musgrave, with her accustomed violence. "I\'m ready to grow old when my time comes, an\' if I get there by the road some have took before me, I guess I sha\'n\'t be put under the sod by any vote o\' town-meetin\'. As I look back, seems to me \'most all them that\'s gone before us has had their uses to the last. Think o\' gramma Jakes! Why, she hadn\'t chick nor child of her own left to bless her, an\' see how she was looked up to, an\' how every little tot in town thought he\'s made if he could be sent to gramma Jakes\'s to do an arrant, an\' she give him a pep\'mint or a cooky. \'Twa\'n\'t the pep\'mint though. \'Twas because she was a real sweet nice old lady, that\'s what \'twas."

"Yes, I remember gramma Jakes," said Anna Dutton, from the corner. She was a round, pink, near-sighted little person, who had tried to cure herself of stammering by speaking very slowly, and now scarcely talked at all because she had found how unwilling her more robust and loquacious neighbors were to give her the right of way in her hindering course. "Seems if I could see her now standin\' there on her front porch, her little handkercher round her neck—"

[296]Caddie broke in upon this reminiscence, according to a custom so established that Anna Dutton only kept her mouth open for an instant, as if the opportunity for speech might return to her, and then quite calmly settled back with an air of pleased attention.

"They\'re afraid o\' gettin\' old an\' they\'re afraid o\' gettin\' fleshy," Caddie announced. "Well, there\'s no crime in gettin\' old, now is there? An\' if there is, you can\'t put a stop to \'t in any court o\' law. An\' as for bein\' fleshy, if you be you be, an\' you might as well turn to an\' have your clo\'es made bigger an\' say no more."

Mrs. Pray presented her mite with her accustomed severity of gloom, as if she had selected the words most carefully and wished to have it understood that they were the choicest she had to offer.

"I was fryin\' doughnuts, a week ago Saturday, an\' Mis\' Denny come along with that lady friend o\' hers that\'s down here over Sunday. I offered \'em each a warm doughnut, an\' they was possessed to take it. They\'d been walkin\' quite a spell, an\' they\'d called for a drink o\' water. They said \'twas the time in the forenoon when they drinked. But they looked at the doughnuts good an\' hard, an\' they says: \'No. It\'s fattenin\',\' says they. \'It\'s fattenin\'.\'"

"Yes," said Caddie, with a scornful cadence, [297]"I\'ll warrant they did. That\'s what they said about two things out o\' three, soon \'s the hands moved round to meal-time. \'It\'s fattenin\'!\' Oh, I\'m sick an\' tired to death of it! I ain\'t goin\' to be dead till I be dead, thinkin\' about it all the time, not if I can keep my thoughts inside o\' me an\' my tongue in my head. So there!"

"Well, now," said Martha Waterman, with the mildness calculated to smooth a troubled situation, "hadn\'t we better be gettin\' round to thinkin\' what we\'ll do to earn us a mite more money for the fund? Seems if, now they\'ve done so well by us, we\'d ought to up an\' show what we can do—a harvest festival, mebbe, or a sociable for all, an\' charge for tickets."

One woman had not spoken. She was a thin, dark-eyed creature, with a gypsy face and a quantity of gray hair wound about on the top of her head. This was Isabel Martin, who was allowed her erratic way because she took it, and because, it had always been said, "You never could tell what Isabel would do next, only she never meant the least o\' harm." She had come softly in while the others were talking, and drawn Ellen\'s work out of her hand, with a swift, pretty smile at her. "Rest your eyes," she had whispered her, and sat by, taking quick, deft stitches, while Ellen, unconscious until then of being tired, had dropped her lids and leaned [298]her head against the casing, with a faint smile of pleasant restfulness. Now Isabel put the work back into Ellen\'s hand with an accurate haste, and looked up at the group about her.

"I\'ll tell you what to do," she said. Her voice thrilled with urging and suggestive mischief. It was a compelling voice, and they turned at once.

"If there ain\'t Isabel," said Martha Waterman. "I didn\'t see you come in."

"Le\' \'s give a fancy dress party of our own," said Isabel.

"Dress ourselves up to the nines, an\' put on paint an\' powder, an\' send off to the stores to hire clo\'es an\' wigs?" inquired Caddie. "No, sir, none o\' that for me. I\'ve seen what it comes to, money an\' labor, too. I\'ve just been through it, lookin\' on, an\' I wouldn\'t do it not if the church never see a brush o\' paint nor a shingle, an\' we had to play on a jew\'s-harp \'stead of a melodeon. No!"

Ann Bartlett gave a little murmur here.

"I never heard of anybody\'s bringin\' a jew\'s-harp into the meetin\'-house," she said, as a kind of official protest. "I guess we could get us some kind of a melodeon, \'fore we done such a thing as that."

Isabel was going on in that persuasive voice; it seemed to call the town to her to do her bidding.

[299]"No, we ain\'t goin\' to do it their way. We\'re goin\' to do it our way. They\'ve set out to see how young they can be. Le\' \'s see \'f we can\'t beat \'em seein\' how old we can............