“Really,” said the lady, “what did they expect?” But the question was so difficult that no one seemed able to make the simple answer.

The incident darkened the day and spoiled its pleasure; it cast a lessening shadow into the evening when the guests met round the fire in the large, ugly new parlor at the hotel.

The next morning the ladies assembled again on the piazza to decide what should be done with the beautiful day before them.  Whitwell stood at the foot of the flag-staff with one hand staying his person against it, like a figure posed in a photograph to verify proportions in the different features of a prospect.

The heroine of the unhappy affair of the picnic could not forbear authorizing herself to invoke his opinion at a certain point of the debate, and “Mr. Whitwell,” she called to him, “won’t you please come here a moment?”

Whitwell slowly pulled himself across the grass to the group, and at the same moment, as if she had been waiting for him to be present, Mrs. Durgin came out of the office door and advanced toward the ladies.

“Mrs. Marven,” she said, with the stony passivity which the ladies used to note in her when they came over to Lion’s Head Farm in the tally-hos, “the stage leaves here at two o’clock to get the down train at three.  I want you should have your trunks ready to go on the wagon a little before two.”

“You want I should have my—­What do you mean, Mrs. Durgin?”

“I want your rooms.”

“You want my rooms?”

Mrs. Durgin did not answer.  She let her steadfast look suffice; and Mrs. Marven went on in a rising flutter:  “Why, you can’t have my rooms!  I don’t understand you.  I’ve taken my rooms for the whole of August, and they are mine; and—­”

“I have got to have your rooms,” said Mrs. Durgin.

“Very well, then, I won’t give them up,” said the lady.  “A bargain’s a bargain, and I have your agreement—­”

“If you’re not out of your rooms by two o’clock, your things will be put out; and after dinner to-day you will not eat another bite under my roof.”

Mrs. Durgin went in, and it remained for the company to make what they could of the affair.  Mrs. Marven did not wait for the result.  She was not a dignified person, but she rose with hauteur and whipped away to her rooms, hers no longer, to make her preparations.  She knew at least how to give her going the effect of quitting the place with disdain and abhorrence.

The incident of her expulsion was brutal, but it was clearly meant to be so.  It made Westover a little sick, and he would have liked to pity Mrs. Marven more than he could.  The ladies said that Mrs. Durgin’s behavior was an outrage, and they ought all to resent it by going straight to their own rooms and packing their things and leaving on the same stage with Mrs. Marven.  None of them did so, and their talk veered around to something extenuating, if not justifying, Mrs. Durgin’s action.