were four pretty girls:  Fanny Dodge, Ellen Dix, Joyce Fulsom and Ethel Mixter.  Each stood looking out of her frame of green, and beamed with happiness in her own youth and beauty.  They did not, could not share the anxiety of the older women.  The more anxious gathered about the cake table.  Four pathetically bedizened middle-aged creatures, three too stout, one too thin, put their heads together in conference.  One woman was Mrs. Maria Dodge, Fanny’s mother, one was Mrs. Amos Dix, one was Mrs. Deacon Whittle, and one was unmarried.

She was the stoutest of the four, tightly laced in an ancient silk, with frizzed hair standing erect from bulging temples.  She was Lois Daggett, and a tragedy.  She loved the young minister, Wesley Elliot, with all her heart and soul and strength.  She had fastened, to attract his admiration, a little bunch of rose geranium leaves and heliotrope in her tightly frizzed hair.  That little posy had, all unrecognized, a touching pathos.  It was as the aigrette, the splendid curves of waving plumage which birds adopt in the desire for love.  Lois had never had a lover.  She had never been pretty, or attractive, but always in her heart had been the hunger for love.  The young minister seemed the ideal of all the dreams of her life.  He was as a god to her.  She trembled under his occasional glances, his casual address caused vibrations in every nerve.  She cherished no illusions.  She knew he was not for her, but she loved and worshipped, and she tucked on an absurd little bow of ribbon, and she frizzed tightly her thin hair, and she wore little posies, following out the primitive instinct of her sex, even while her reason lagged behind.  If once Wesley should look at that pitiful little floral ornament, should think it pretty, it would have meant as much to that starved virgin soul as a kiss—­to do her justice, as a spiritual kiss.  There was in reality only pathos and tragedy in her adoration.  It was not in the least earthy, or ridiculous, but it needed a saint to understand that.  Even while she conferred with her friends, she never lost sight of the young man, always hoped for that one fleeting glance of approbation.

When her sister-in-law, Mrs. Daggett, appeared, she restrained her wandering eyes.  All four women conferred anxiously.  They, with Mrs. Solomon Black, had engineered the fair.  Mrs. Black had not yet appeared and they all wondered why.  Abby Daggett, who had the expression of a saint—­a fleshy saint, in old purple muslin—­gazed about her with admiration.

“Don’t it look perfectly lovely!” she exclaimed.

Mrs. Whittle fairly snapped at her, like an angry old dog.  “Lovely!” said she with a fine edge of sarcasm in her tone, “perfectly lovely!  Yes it does.  But I think we are a set of fools, the whole of us.  Here we’ve got a fair all ready, and worked our fingers to the bone (I don’t know but I’ll have a felon on account of that drawn-in rug there) and we’ve used up all our butter and eggs, and I don’t see, for one, who is going to buy anything.  I ain’t got any money t’ spend.  I don’t believe Mrs. Slocum will come over from Grenoble, and if she does, she can’t buy everything.”