Mrs. Corbett was mashing potatoes with a gem-jar, and without stopping her work she said:  “Oh, well, Miss Thornley, it’s easy for you and me to say we would not go out with Rance Belmont, but maybe that’s mostly because we have never had the chance.  He’s got a pretty nice way with him, Rance has, and I guess if he came along now with his sorrel pacer and says to you, ‘Come on, Miss Thornley,’ you would get on that boot and stocking in two jiffies and be off with him like any young girl!”

Miss Thornley mumbled a denial, and an angry light shone in her pale blue eyes.

Mrs. Smith was also full of the subject, and while she twisted her hair into a small “nub” about the size, shape and color of a peanut, she expressed her views.

“It ain’t decent for her to be goin’ round with Rance Belmont the way she does, and they say at the dance at Millford she never missed a dance.  Since Rance has got his money from England he hasn’t done a thing but play cards with them twins and take her round.  I don’t see how her man can put up with it, but he’s an awful easy-goin’ chap—­just the kind that wouldn’t notice anything wrong until he’d come home some night and find her gone.  I haven’t one bit of respect for her.”

“Oh, now, Mrs. Smith, you’re too hard on her.  She’s young and pretty and likes a good time.”  Mrs. Corbett was giving her steel knives a quick rub with ashes out of deference to the lady stoppers.  “It’s easy enough for folks like us,” waving her knife to include all present, “to be very respectable and never get ourselves talked about, for nobody’s askin’ us to go to dances or fly around with them, but with her it’s different.  Don’t be hard on her!  She ain’t goin’ to do anything she shouldn’t.”

But the ladies were loath to adopt Mrs. Corbett’s point of view.  All their lives nothing had happened, and here was a deliciously exciting possible scandal, and they clung to it.

“They say the old man Grant is nearly a millionaire, and he’s getting lonely for her, and is pretty near ready to forgive her and Fred and take them back.  Wouldn’t it be awful if the old man should come up here and find she’d gone with Rance Belmont?”

Mrs. Berry looked anxiously around the kitchen as if searching for the lost one.

“Oh, don’t worry,” declared Mrs. Corbett; “she ain’t a quitter.  She’ll stay with her own man; they’re happy as ever I saw two people.”

“If she did go,” Miss Thornley said, sentimentally, “if she did go, do you suppose she’d leave a note pinned on the pin-cushion?  I think they mostly do!”

When the ladies had gone that afternoon, and while Mrs. Corbett washed the white ironstone dishes, she was not nearly so composed and confident in mind as she pretended to be.

“Don’t it beat the band how much they find out?  I often wonder how things get to be known.  I do wish she wouldn’t give them the chance to talk, but she’s not the one that will take tellin’—­too much like her father for that—­and still I kind o’ like her for her spunky ways.  Rance is a divil, but she don’t know that.  It is pretty hard to tell what ought to be done.  This is surely work for the Almighty, and not for sinful human beings!”