edora
Pete has just put on his head and Max Longman laughs and wants to know
what difference it makes how a married man with a bald spot looks.
Then he turns away to pick out carefully the kind of tie that will make
him most pleasing in Clara's sight on the morrow.

In the ladies' department of that same store Jocelyn Brownlee is asking
for long, white silk gloves. A little hush falls on the crowd of
feminine shoppers as Mrs. Pete gets the stepladder, mounts it and
brings down with a good deal of visible pride a pasteboard box
containing six pairs of white silk gloves that Pete bought three years
ago in a moment of incomprehensible madness, a thing which Mrs. Pete
has never until this minute forgiven him.

Jocelyn, pretty, eager, unaffected, selects the very first pair and is
wholly unconscious of the stir she has made. It is only when David
Allan comes up and asks her if she is ready that she becomes confused
and conscious of the watching eyes of the other buyers.

She has promised to go to the Decoration Day exercises with David and
has hurried to buy gloves for the occasion not knowing, in her city
innocence, that gloves aren't the style in Green Valley, leastways not
for any outdoor festival.

David watches the gloves being wrapped up and that reminds him that it
wouldn't hurt to buy a new buggy whip, one of the smart ones with the
bit of red, white and blue ribbon on its tip that he saw standing in
Dick's window.

So he and Jocelyn go off together to get the whip. It is the first
time that Jocelyn has been out in the village streets after nightfall
and she looks about her with eager eyes.

"My--how pretty the streets look and sound! It's ever so much prettier
than village street scenes on the stage!" she confides to David. And
David laughs and takes her over to Martin's for a soda and then,
because it is still early, he coaxes her to walk about town with him
and as a final treat they stop in front of Mary Langely's millinery
shop.

Mary Langely's shop stands right back of Joe Baldwin's place on the
next street. Mary is a widow with two girls. Dora is the Green Valley
telephone operator and Nellie is typist and office girl for old Mr.
Dunn who is Green Valley's best real estate and lawyer man. He sells
lots, now and then a house, writes insurance and draws up wills,
collects bills or rather coaxes careless neighbors to settle their
accounts, and he absolutely does not believe in divorce or woman
su