oung thing and a _rill_ hired
girl,--entertained "above the most," put out her sewing and wore, we
kept in the back of our minds, a bar pin, solid, with "four solitaires"
in it. And, "Oh, you know," Calliope Marsh admitted to me later, "Mis'
Sykes is rilly a great society woman. They isn't anybody's funeral that
she don't get to ride to the cemet'ry."

Mrs. Ricker and Kitton accepted the situation with fine philosophy.

"Of course," she said, "the whole town can dance to the Sykeses'
fiddlin' if they want. But it's a pretty pass if they do let anybody
step in before me that's washed for 'em an' cleaned their houses years
on end."

My own course was pleasantly simple. Mrs. Ricker and Kitton had included
me on her list, accredited, no doubt, because a few weeks earlier she
had helped me to settle my belongings in Oldmoxon house, and since then
had twice swept for me, and was to come in a day or two to do so again.
As I had instantly accepted her invitation, I had no choice when Mis'
Sykes's "written invite" came, even though when it arrived Mis' Sykes
herself was calling on me.

"Well said," she observed, when she saw a neighbour's little girl, her
temporary servitor, coming up my walk with the invitations in a paper
bag to be kept clean, "I meant to get my call made on you before your
invite got here. I hope you'll overlook taking us both together. I've
meant to call on you before, but I declare it looked like a mountain to
me to get started out. Don't you find your calls a rill chore?"

But Mis' Sykes's visit was, she confessed, "Errand as well as Call."

"The Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality," she told
me, as she rose to go, "is to our wits' end to get up a new
entertainment. We want to give something, and we want it should be rill
new and spicey, but of course it has to be pretty quiet, owing to the
Cause--the Dead, so. It bars us from home-talent evenings or festivals
or like that. And the minute I saw the inside o' your house it come to
me: of course you know your house is differ'nt from Friendship. If I'd
been shot out of a gun into it, I wouldn't 'a' sensed I was in
Friendship at all. You've got nice things, all carved an' hard to dust.
The Oldmoxons use' to do a lot o' entertainin', an' everybody remembers
it, an' the house has been shut quite some time. Well, now, you've been
ask' to join the Sodality. An' if you was to announce an Evening Benefit
for it, here in your home, the whol