“How about the preserves?” asked Sophia.

“I didn’t see the preserves,” said Mehetabel calmly.

“You see, I went right to the room where the quilt was and then I didn’t want to leave it.  It had been so long since I’d seen it.  I had to look at it first real good myself and then I looked at the others to see if there was any that could come up to it.  And then the people begin comin’ in and I got so interested in hearin’ what they had to say I couldn’t think of goin’ anywheres else.  I ate my lunch right there too, and I’m as glad as can be I did, too; for what do you think?”—­she gazed about her with kindling eyes—­“while I stood there with a sandwich in one hand didn’t the head of the hull concern come in and open the glass door and pin ‘First Prize’ right in the middle of the quilt!”

There was a stir of congratulation and proud exclamation.  Then Sophia returned again to the attack, “Didn’t you go to see anything else?” she queried.

“Why, no,” said Mehetabel.  “Only the quilt.  Why should I?”

She fell into a reverie where she saw again the glorious creation of her hand and brain hanging before all the world with the mark of highest approval on it.  She longed to make her listeners see the splendid vision with her.  She struggled for words; she reached blindly after unknown superlatives.  “I tell you it looked like——­” she said, and paused, hesitating.  Vague recollections of hymn-book phraseology came into her mind, the only form of literary expression she knew; but they were dismissed as being sacrilegious, and also not sufficiently forcible.  Finally, “I tell you it looked real well!” she assured them, and sat staring into the fire, on her tired old face the supreme content of an artist who has realized his ideal.

PORTRAIT OF A PHILOSOPHER

I

The news of Professor Gridley’s death filled Middletown College with consternation.  Its one claim to distinction was gone, for in spite of the excessive quiet of his private life, he had always cast about the obscure little college the shimmering aura of greatness.  There had been no fondness possible for the austere old thinker, but Middletown village, as well as the college, had been touched by his fidelity to the very moderate attractions of his birthplace.  When, as often happened, some famous figure was seen on the streets, people used to say first, “Here to see old Grid, I suppose,” and then, “Funny how he sticks here.  They say he was offered seven thousand at the University of California.”  In the absence of any known motive for this steadfastness, the village legend-making instinct had evolved a theory that he did not wish to move away from a State of which his father had been Governor, and where the name of Gridley was like a patent of nobility.