o know that that old maid has been doing a
mighty queer thing lately."

"First thing you know you will be an old maid yourself, and then your
stones will break your own glass house," said Abby Simson.

"Oh, I don't care," retorted Ethel. "Nowadays an old maid isn't an old
maid except from choice, and everybody knows it. But it must have been
different in Miss Eudora's time. Why, she is older than you are, Miss
Abby."

"Just five years," replied Abby, unruffled, "and she had chances, and I
know it."

"Why didn't she take them, then?"

"Maybe," said Abby, "girls had choice then as much as now, but I never
could make out why she didn't marry Harry Lawton."

Ethel gave her head a toss. "Maybe," said she, "once in a while, even so
long ago, a girl wasn't so crazy to get married as folks thought. Maybe
she didn't want him."

"She did want him," said Abby. "A girl doesn't get so pale and
peaked-looking for nothing as Eudora Yates did, after she had dismissed
Harry Lawton and he had gone away, nor haunt the post-office as she used
to, and, when she didn't get a letter, go away looking as if she would
die."

"Maybe," said Ethel, "her folks were opposed."

"Nobody ever opposed Eudora Yates except her own self," replied Abby.
"Her father was dead, and Eudora's ma thought the sun rose and set
in her. She would never have opposed her if she had wanted to marry a
foreign duke or the old Harry himself."

"I remember it perfectly," said Mrs. Joseph Glynn.

"So do I," said Julia Esterbrook.

"Don't see why you shouldn't. You were plenty old enough to have your
memory in good working order if it was ever going to be," said Abby
Simson.

"Well," said Ethel, "it is the funniest thing I ever heard of. If a girl
wanted a man enough to go all to pieces over him, and he wanted her, why
on earth didn't she take him?"

"Maybe they quarreled," ventured Mrs. Edward Lee, who was a mild,
sickly-looking woman and seldom expressed an opinion.

"Well, that might have been," agreed Abby, "although Eudora always had
the name of having a beautiful disposition."

"I have always found," said Mrs. Joseph Glynn, with an air of wisdom,
"that it is the beautiful dispositions which are the most set the minute
they get a start the wrong way. It is the always-flying-out people who
are the easiest to get on with in the long run."

"Well," said Abby, "maybe that is so, but folks might get worn all to a
frazzle by the flying-out ones before the