Louisa and I thought Flora might be right.  At all events, we did not wish to set ourselves up in opposition to her.  We never carried the books into the society, and we never read Mrs. Jameson’s letter about them, though we did feel somewhat guilty, especially as we reflected that Flora had never forgotten the affair of the jumbles, and might possibly have allowed her personal feelings to influence her.

“I should feel very sorry,” said Louisa to me, “if we were preventing the women of this village from improving themselves.”

“Well, we can wait until next summer, and let Mrs. Jameson take the responsibility.  I don’t want to be the means of breaking up the society, for one,” said I.

However, when Mrs. Jameson finally arrived in June, she seemed to be on a slightly different tack, so to speak, of improvement.  She was not so active in our literary society and our sewing circle as she had been the summer before, but now, her own sphere having possibly enlarged, she had designs upon the village in the abstract.

Hannah Bell came over from the West Corners to open the house for them, and at five o’clock we saw the Grover stage rattle past with their trunks on top, and Grandma Cobb and the girls and Cobb looking out of the windows.  Mrs. Jameson, being delicate, was, of course, leaning back, exhausted with her journey.  Jonas Martin, who had been planting the garden, was out at the gate of the Wray house to help the driver carry in the trunks, and Hannah Bell was there too.

Louisa and I had said that it seemed almost too bad not to have some one of the village women go there and welcome them, but we did not know how Mrs. H. Boardman Jameson might take it, and nobody dared go.  Mrs. White said that she would have been glad to make some of her cream biscuits and send them over, but she knew that Mrs. Jameson would not eat them, of course, and she did not know whether she would like any of the others to, and might think it a liberty.

So nobody did anything but watch.  It was not an hour after the stage coach arrived before we saw Grandma Cobb coming up the road.  We did not know whether she was going to Amelia Powers’, or Mrs. Jones’, or to our house; but she turned in at our gate.

We went to the door to meet her, and I must say she did seem glad to see us, and we were glad to see her.  In a very short time we knew all that had happened in the Jameson family since they had left Linnville, and with no urging, and with even some reluctance on our part.  It did not seem quite right for us to know how much Mrs. Jameson had paid her dressmaker for making her purple satin, and still less so for us to know that she had not paid for the making of her black lace net and the girls’ organdy muslins, though she had been dunned three times.  The knowledge was also forced upon us that all these fine new clothes were left in New York, since the shabby old ones must be worn out in the country, and that Harriet had cried because she could not bring some of her pretty gowns with her.