shops of Paris and New York, her clothes seemed to
the women of Santa Paloma to be surprising, too. She and her daughters
wore plain ginghams for every day, with plain wide hats and trim serge
coats for foggy mornings. And on Sundays it was certainly extraordinary
to meet the Burgoynes, bound for church, wearing the simplest of dimity
or cross-barred muslin wash dresses, with black stockings and shoes,
and hats as plain--far plainer!--as those of the smallest children.
Except for the amazing emeralds that blazed beside her wedding ring,
and the diamonds she sometimes wore, Mrs. Burgoyne might have been a
trained nurse in uniform.

"It is a pose," said Mrs. Willard White, at the club, to a few intimate
friends. "She's probably imitating some English countess. Englishwomen
affect simplicity in the country. But wait until we see her evening
frocks."

It was felt that any formal calling upon Mrs. Burgoyne must wait until
the supposedly inevitable session with carpenters, painters,
paper-hangers, carpet-layers, upholsterers, decorators, furniture
dealers, and gardeners was over at the Hall. But although the old house
had been painted and the plumbing overhauled before the new owner's
arrival, and although all day long and every day two or three
Portuguese day-laborers chopped and pruned and shouted in the garden, a
week and then two weeks slipped by, and no further evidences of
renovation were to be seen.

So presently callers began to go up to the Hall; first Mrs. Apostleman
and Mrs. White, as was fitting, and then a score of other women. Mrs.
Apostleman had been the social leader in Santa Paloma when Mrs. White
was little Clara Peck, a pretty girl in the High School, whose rich
widowed mother dressed her exquisitely, and who was studying French,
and could play the violin. But Mrs. Apostleman was an old woman now,
and had been playing the game a long time, and she was glad to put the
sceptre into younger hands. And she could have put it into none more
competent than those of Mrs. Willard White.

Mrs. White was a handsome, clever woman, of perhaps six-or
seven-and-thirty. She had been married now for seventeen years, and for
all that time, and even before her marriage, she had been the most
envied, the most admired, and the most copied woman in the village. Her
mother, an insipid, spoiled, ambitious little woman, whose fondest hope
was realized when her dashing daughter made a financially brilliant
match, had lost no ti