n the
discipline of matrimony, to the contentment that results from an
essentially circumscribed and comfortable life. She was, I learned
later, the second Mrs. Hutchins, and Maude their only child. The
children of the first marriage, all girls, had married and scattered.

Supper was a decorous but heterogeneous meal of the old-fashioned sort
that gives one the choice between tea and cocoa. It was something of
an occasion, I suspected. The minister was there, the Reverend Mr.
Doddridge, who would have made, in appearance at least, a perfect
Puritan divine in a steeple hat and a tippet. Only--he was no longer
the leader of the community; and even in his grace he had the air of
deferring to the man who provided the bounties of which we were about
to partake rather than to the Almighty. Young George was there, Mr.
Hutchins's nephew, who was daily becoming more and more of a factor in
the management of the mills, and had built the house of yellow brick
that stood out so incongruously among the older Hutchinses' mansions,
and marked a transition. I thought him rather a yellow-brick gentleman
himself for his assumption of cosmopolitan manners. His wife was a
pretty, discontented little woman who plainly deplored her environment,
longed for larger fields of conquest: George, she said, must remain
where he was, for the present at least,--Uncle Ezra depended on him; but
Elkington was a prosy place, and Mrs. George gave the impression that
she did not belong here. They went to the city on occasions; both
cities. And when she told me we had a common acquaintance in Mrs.
Hambleton Durrett--whom she thought so lovely!--I knew that she had
taken Nancy as an ideal: Nancy, the social leader of what was to Mrs.
George a metropolis.

Presently the talk became general among the men, the subject being the
campaign, and I the authority, bombarded with questions I strove to
answer judicially. What was the situation in this county and in that?
the national situation? George indulged in rather a vigorous arraignment
of the demagogues, national and state, who were hurting business in
order to obtain political power. The Reverend Mr. Doddridge assented,
deploring the poverty that the local people had brought on themselves
by heeding the advice of agitators; and Mrs. Hutchins, who spent much of
her time in charity work, agreed with the minister when he declared
that the trouble was largely due to a decline in Christian belief. Ezra
Hutchins, to