per for a stout woman who has cause to be vain of her
feet. We noticed that her trips downtown were rare that spring and
summer. She used to come home laden with little bundles; and before
supper she would change her street clothes for a neat, washable
housedress, as is our thrifty custom. Through her bright windows we
could see her moving briskly about from kitchen to sitting room; and
from the smells that floated out from her kitchen door, she seemed to
be preparing for her solitary supper the same homely viands that were
frying or stewing or baking in our kitchens. Sometimes you could
detect the delectable scent of browning, hot tea biscuit. It takes a
determined woman to make tea biscuit for no one but herself.

Blanche Devine joined the church. On the first Sunday morning she came
to the service there was a little flurry among the ushers at the
vestibule door. They seated her well in the rear. The second Sunday
morning a dreadful thing happened. The woman next to whom they seated
her turned, regarded her stonily for a moment, then rose agitatedly and
moved to a pew across the aisle.

Blanche Devine's face went a dull red beneath her white powder. She
never came again--though we saw the minister visit her once or twice.
She always accompanied him to the door pleasantly, holding it well open
until he was down the little flight of steps and on the sidewalk. The
minister's wife did not call.

She rose early, like the rest of us; and as summer came on we used to
see her moving about in her little garden patch in the dewy, golden
morning. She wore absurd pale-blue negligees that made her stout figure
loom immense against the greenery of garden and apple tree. The
neighborhood women viewed these negligees with Puritan disapproval as
they smoothed down their own prim, starched gingham skirts. They said
it was disgusting--and perhaps it was; but the habit of years is not
easily overcome. Blanche Devine--snipping her sweet peas, peering
anxiously at the Virginia creeper that clung with such fragile fingers
to the trellis, watering the flower baskets that hung from her
porch--was blissfully unconscious of the disapproving eyes. I wish one
of us had just stopped to call good morning to her over the fence, and
to say in our neighborly, small-town way: "My, ain't this a scorcher!
So early too! It'll be fierce by noon!"

But we did not.

I think perhaps the evenings must have been the loneliest for her. The
summ