of
the Episcopalian flock--and Mrs. Conklin told the women that altogether
he was a credit to his sex and his family--a remark which was passed
about ribaldly in town for a dozen years, though Mortimer Conklin never
knew that he was the subject of a town joke. Once he rebuked a man in
the barber shop for speaking of feminine extravagance, and told the shop
that he did not stint his wife, that when she asked him for money he
always gave it to her without question, and that if she wanted a dress
he told her to buy it and send the bill to him. And we are such a polite
people that no one in the crowded shop laughed--until Mortimer Conklin
went out.

Of course at the office we have known for twenty-five years what the men
thought of Mortimer, but not until Miss Larrabee joined the force did we
know that among the women Mrs. Conklin was considered an oracle. Miss
Larrabee said that her mother has a legend that when Priscilla Winthrop
brought home from Boston the first sealskin sacque ever worn in town she
gave a party for it, and it lay in its box on the big walnut bureau in
the spare room of the Conklin mansion in solemn state, while
seventy-five women salaamed to it. After that Priscilla Winthrop was the
town authority on sealskins. When any member of the town nobility had a
new sealskin, she took it humbly to Priscilla Winthrop to pass judgment
upon it. If Priscilla said it was London-dyed, its owner pranced away
on clouds of glory; but if she said it was American-dyed, its owner
crawled away in shame, and when one admired the disgraced garment, the
martyred owner smiled with resigned sweetness and said humbly: "Yes--but
it's only American-dyed, you know."

No dervish ever questioned the curse of the priestess. The only time a
revolt was imminent was in the autumn of 1884 when the Conklins returned
from their season at Duxbury, Massachusetts, and Mrs. Conklin took up
the carpets in her house, heroically sold all of them at the second-hand
store, put in new waxed floors and spread down rugs. The town uprose and
hooted; the outcasts and barbarians in the Methodist and Baptist
Missionary Societies rocked the Conklin home with their merriment, and
ten dervishes with set faces bravely met the onslaughts of the savages;
but among themselves in hushed whispers, behind locked doors, the
faithful wondered if there was not a mistake some place. However, when
Priscilla Winthrop assured them that in all the best homes in Boston
rug