dged and morocco
bound, and an ornament to any parlor, but I can't afford her. My style
is cloth, good substantial cloth, one dollar down and one dollar a month
until paid. As I might say."

CHAPTER II. Susan

Mrs. Tarbro-Smith had arranged the picnic herself, hoping to bring a
little pleasure into the dullness of the summer, enliven the interest in
the little church, and make a pleasant day for the people of Clarence,
and she had succeeded in this as in everything she had undertaken during
her summer in Iowa. As the leader of her own little circle of bright
people in New York, she was accustomed to doing things successfully, and
perhaps she was too sure of always having things her own way. As sister
of the world-famous author, Marriott Nolan Tarbro, she was always
received with consideration in New York, even by editors, but in seeking
out a dead eddy in middle Iowa she had been in search of the two things
that the woman author most desires, and best handles: local color and
types. The editor of MURRAY'S MAGAZINE had told her that his native
ground--middle Iowa--offered fresh material for her pen, and, intent
on opening this new mine of local color, she had stolen away without
letting even her most intimate friends know where she was going. To have
her coming heralded would have put her "types" on their guard, and for
that reason she had assumed as an impenetrable incognito one-half her
name. No rays of reflected fame glittered on plain Mrs. Smith.

While her literary side had found some pleasure in studying the people
she had fallen among, she was not able to recognize the distinctness
of type in them that the editor of MURRAY'S had led her to believe she
should find. She had hoped to discover in Clarence a type as sharply
defined as the New England Yankee or the York County Dutch of
Pennsylvania, but she could not see that the middle Iowan was anything
but the average country person such as is found anywhere in Illinois,
Indiana, and Ohio, a type that is hard to portray with fidelity, except
with rather more skill than she felt she had, since it is composed of
innumerable ingredients drawn not only from New England, but from nearly
every State, and from all the nations of Europe. However, her kindness
of heart had been able to exert itself bountifully, and she had had
enough experience in her sundry searches for local color to know that
a lapse of time and of distance would emphasize the types she was now