By May, Blanche Devine had left off her diamond eardrops—­perhaps it was their absence that gave her face a new expression.  When she went down town we noticed that her hats were more like the hats the other women in our town wore; but she still affected extravagant footgear, as is right and proper for a stout woman who has cause to be vain of her feet.  We noticed that her trips down town were rare that spring and summer.  She used to come home laden with little bundles; and before supper she would change her street clothes for a neat, washable housedress, as is our thrifty custom.  Through her bright windows we could see her moving briskly about from kitchen to sitting room; and from the smells that floated out from her kitchen door, she seemed to be preparing for her solitary supper the same homely viands that were frying or stewing or baking in our kitchens.  Sometimes you could detect the delectable scent of browning hot tea biscuit.  It takes a brave, courageous, determined woman to make tea biscuit for no one but herself.

Blanche Devine joined the church.  On the first Sunday morning she came to the service there was a little flurry among the ushers at the vestibule door.  They seated her well in the rear.  The second Sunday morning a dreadful thing happened.  The woman next to whom they seated her turned, regarded her stonily for a moment, then rose agitatedly and moved to a pew across the aisle.  Blanche Devine’s face went a dull red beneath her white powder.  She never came again—­though we saw the minister visit her once or twice.  She always accompanied him to the door pleasantly, holding it well open until he was down the little flight of steps and on the sidewalk.  The minister’s wife did not call—­but, then, there are limits to the duties of a minister’s wife.

She rose early, like the rest of us; and as summer came on we used to see her moving about in her little garden patch in the dewy, golden morning.  She wore absurd pale-blue kimonos that made her stout figure loom immense against the greenery of garden and apple tree.  The neighbourhood women viewed these negligees with Puritan disapproval as they smoothed down their own prim, starched gingham skirts.  They said it was disgusting—­and perhaps it was; but the habit of years is not easily overcome.  Blanche Devine—­snipping her sweet peas; peering anxiously at the Virginia creeper that clung with such fragile fingers to the trellis; watering the flower baskets that hung from her porch—­was blissfully unconscious of the disapproving eyes.  I wish one of us had just stopped to call good morning to her over the fence, and to say in our neighbourly, small town way:  “My, ain’t this a scorcher!  So early too!  It’ll be fierce by noon!” But we did not.