e Spring, or anywhere else you say.
May Meetin's just a Sunday picnic, anyway."

But Mary's conscience forbade such Sabbath breaking. It was all right to
have a picnic after you had been to preaching, but to have the picnic
without the previous church-going was not to be thought of.

It was a Sunday of great events. Not only was it May Meeting Sunday, but
the Sawyer twins were to be baptized, and Sidney Harris and his bride
were to make their first appearance in public that day. Sidney had
married a young girl from the upper part of the State, and it was
rumored that her wedding clothes had been made in New York, that they
were worth "a small fortune." One costume in particular, it was said,
had cost "a cool hundred", and every woman in the church had a secret
hope of seeing the gown at the May Meeting.

According to custom, every one wore her freshest, newest raiment in
honor of the day and the month. Mary usually felt an innocent pleasure
in looking at the new apparel of her friends, but to-day, as she glanced
around, she was moved by a strange feeling of irritation, weariness, and
dissatisfaction. That she was wearing old clothes while every one else
wore new ones gave her little concern; but just in front of her sat
Ellen McElrath in the blue and white gingham waist that she and Ellen
had cut out that dreadful afternoon when the sponge cake burnt up, and
Ellen's little boy pulled up all her clove pinks. The back of the waist
was cut on the bias, and the stripes did not hit. How she had worked and
worried over those stripes and lain awake at night, wondering if she
ought not to buy Ellen enough goods to cut a new back. She turned away
her eyes, and there, across the aisle, was little May Johnson in the
pink blouse that recalled the morning when Mary had left her churning
and baking six times to show May's mother the working of that mysterious
chart. And there was Aunt Amanda Bassett, ambling heavily down to the
"amen corner" in the black alpaca skirt that would wrinkle over her
ample hips in spite of all the letting out and taking up that had been
done for it that hot afternoon when the bread burned to a crisp, while
Mary was down on the floor turning up Aunt Amanda's hem and trying to
make both sides of the skirt the same length. And here came Annie
Matthews in the brown and white shirt waist, that was an all-around
misfit because Annie had thought that three fourths of sixteen inches
was eight inches, Mary blamed