to the contentment that results from an
essentially circumscribed and comfortable life. She was, I learned later,
the second Mrs. Hutchins, and Maude their only child. The children of the
first marriage, all girls, had married and scattered.

Supper was a decorous but heterogeneous meal of the old-fashioned sort
that gives one the choice between tea and cocoa. It was something of an
occasion, I suspected. The minister was there, the Reverend Mr.
Doddridge, who would have made, in appearance at least, a perfect Puritan
divine in a steeple hat and a tippet. Only--he was no longer the leader
of the community; and even in his grace he had the air of deferring to
the man who provided the bounties of which we were about to partake
rather than to the Almighty. Young George was there, Mr. Hutchins's
nephew, who was daily becoming more and more of a factor in the
management of the mills, and had built the house of yellow brick that
stood out so incongruously among the older Hutchinses' mansions, and
marked a transition. I thought him rather a yellow-brick gentleman
himself for his assumption of cosmopolitan manners. His wife was a
pretty, discontented little woman who plainly deplored her environment,
longed for larger fields of conquest: George, she said, must remain where
he was, for the present at least,--Uncle Ezra depended on him; but
Elkington was a prosy place, and Mrs. George gave the impression that she
did not belong here. They went to the city on occasions; both cities. And
when she told me we had a common acquaintance in Mrs. Hambleton
Durrett--whom she thought so lovely!--I knew that she had taken Nancy as
an ideal: Nancy, the social leader of what was to Mrs. George a
metropolis.

Presently the talk became general among the men, the subject being the
campaign, and I the authority, bombarded with questions I strove to
answer judicially. What was the situation in this county and in that? the
national situation? George indulged in rather a vigorous arraignment of
the demagogues, national and state, who were hurting business in order to
obtain political power. The Reverend Mr. Doddridge assented, deploring
the poverty that the local people had brought on themselves by heeding
the advice of agitators; and Mrs. Hutchins, who spent much of her time in
charity work, agreed with the minister when he declared that the trouble
was largely due to a decline in Christian belief. Ezra Hutchins, too,
nodded at this.

"Take that