intment was
Azuba, who appeared just as the visitors were at the door, to announce
that "that foolhead of a grocer's boy" hadn't brought the things she
ordered and what they was going to do for breakfast she didn't know.

"I could give you b'iled eggs," she added, "but Captain Dan'l made such
a fuss about them we had yesterday that I didn't dast to do it without
askin' you. I wanted to have some picked-up fish, but they didn't keep
none but the hashed-up kind that comes in pasteboard boxes, and I'd just
as soon eat hay as that."

On the way home Mrs. Black divided her discourse into two parts, one a
scorching of her husband for falling asleep and making her ridiculous
before the Fenholtzes, and the other a sort of irritated soliloquy
concerning "those Dotts" and the way in which they had been loaded upon
her shoulders.

"I did my best to keep the Guild out of the conversation," she said,
"but that Fenholtz woman had to drag it in, and now, of course, I've
got to take that Dott person to the next meeting and introduce her to
everybody, and I suppose I shall have to see that she is made a member.
Oh, dear! I almost wish I had never seen Trumet."

B. Phelps grunted. "Humph!" he said. "If the Fenholtzes take them up I
don't see what you've got to kick about. You've been trying to get in
the Fenholtz set yourself for the last three years. Maybe you can do it
now."

CHAPTER VI

The Scarford Chapter of the Guild of the Ladies of Honor was not as
large a body as Mrs. Black in the exuberance of her Trumet conversation
had led Serena to think. In reality, its membership was less than a
hundred. It was formed in the beginning by a number of seceders from the
local Women's Club, who, disappointed in their office-seeking ambitions
and deeming the club old-fashioned and old-fogyish in its ideas, had
elected to form an organization of their own. They had affiliated
with the national order of the Ladies of Honor, chiefly because of the
opportunity which such a body offered for office holding and notoriety.
The members were not drawn from the oldest families of Scarford nor from
those whose social position was established. They were chiefly the
wives and daughters of men who had made money rather suddenly; would-be
geniuses whose genius had not been recognized as yet; women to whom
public speaking and publicity were as the breath of their nostrils;
extravagants and social climbers of all sorts.

The purposes of the organi