lmost as pleasant as an
operation on one's self to hear Mrs. Conklin tell about hers. And they
thought it was rather brutal--so Miss Larrabee afterward told us--when
Mrs. Worthington went to the hospital one month, and gave her famous
Delsarte lecture course the next month, and explained to the women that
if she wasn't as heavy as she used to be it was because she had had
everything cut out of her below the windpipe. It seemed to the temple
priestesses that, considering what a serious time poor dear Priscilla
Winthrop had gone through, Mrs. Worthington was making light of serious
things.

There is no doubt that the formal rebellion of Mrs. Worthington, Duchess
of Grand Rapids, and known of the town's nobility as the Pretender,
began with the hospital contest. The Pretender planted her siege-guns
before the walls of the temple of the priestess, and prepared for
business. The first manoeuvre made by the beleaguered one was to give a
luncheon in the mosque, at which, though it was midwinter, fresh
tomatoes and fresh strawberries were served, and a real authoress from
Boston talked upon John Fiske's philosophy and, in the presence of the
admiring guests, made a new kind of salad dressing for the fresh lettuce
and tomatoes. Thirty women who watched her forgot what John Fiske's
theory of the cosmos is, and thirty husbands who afterward ate that
salad dressing have learned to suffer and be strong. But that salad
dressing undermined the faith of thirty mere men--raw outlanders to be
sure--in the social omniscience of Priscilla Winthrop. Of course they
did not see it made; the spell of the enchantress was not over them; but
in their homes they maintained that if Priscilla Winthrop didn't know
any more about cosmic philosophy than to pay a woman forty dollars to
make a salad dressing like that--and the whole town knows that was the
price--the vaunted town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with its old
furniture and new culture, which Priscilla spoke of in such repressed
ecstasy, is probably no better than Manitou, Colorado, where they get
their Indian goods from Buffalo, New York.

Such is the perverse reasoning of man. And Mrs. Worthington, having
lived with considerable of a man for fifteen years, hearing echoes of
this sedition, attacked the fortification of the faithful on its weakest
side. She invited the thirty seditious husbands with their wives to a
beefsteak dinner, where she heaped their plates with planked sirloin,
garnishe