ly
deepen her satin cheek as you watched. For Mrs. Tretherick was very
sweetly conscious of admiration and, like most pretty women, gathered
herself under your eye like a racer under the spur.

And then, of course, there came trouble. I have it from the soprano--a
little lady who possessed even more than the usual unprejudiced judgment
of her sex--that Mrs. Tretherick's conduct was simply shameful; that her
conceit was unbearable; that, if she considered the rest of the choir
as slaves, she (the soprano) would like to know it; that her conduct on
Easter Sunday with the basso had attracted the attention of the whole
congregation; and that she herself had noticed Dr. Cope twice look up
during the service; that her (the soprano's) friends had objected to her
singing in the choir with a person who had been on the stage, but
she had waived this. Yet she had it from the best authority that Mrs.
Tretherick had run away from her husband, and that this red-haired child
who sometimes came in the choir was not her own. The tenor confided to
me behind the organ that Mrs. Tretherick had a way of sustaining a note
at the end of a line in order that her voice might linger longer with
the congregation--an act that could be attributed only to a defective
moral nature; that as a man (he was a very popular dry goods clerk on
weekdays, and sang a good deal from apparently behind his eyebrows on
the Sabbath)--that as a man, sir, he would put up with it no longer.
The basso alone--a short German with a heavy voice, for which he seemed
reluctantly responsible, and rather grieved at its possession--stood up
for Mrs. Tretherick, and averred that they were jealous of her because
she was "bretty." The climax was at last reached in an open quarrel,
wherein Mrs. Tretherick used her tongue with such precision of statement
and epithet that the soprano burst into hysterical tears, and had to
be supported from the choir by her husband and the tenor. This act was
marked intentionally to the congregation by the omission of the usual
soprano solo. Mrs. Tretherick went home flushed with triumph, but
on reaching her room frantically told Carry that they were beggars
henceforward; that she--her mother--had just taken the very bread out
of her darling's mouth, and ended by bursting into a flood of penitent
tears. They did not come so quickly as in her old poetical days; but
when they came they stung deeply. She was roused by a formal visit from
a vestryman--o