She gave her whole time to imagining and organizing the personal display on the coach.  She consulted with the other ladies as to the kind of dresses that were to be worn, but she decided everything herself; and when the time came she had all the young men ravaging the lanes and pastures for the goldenrod and asters which formed the keynote of her decoration for the coach.

She made peace and kept it between factions that declared themselves early in the affair, and of all who could have criticized her for taking the lead perhaps none would have willingly relieved her of the trouble.  She freely declared that it was killing her, and she sounded her accents of despair all over the place.  When their dresses were finished she made the persons of her drama rehearse it on the coach top in the secret of the barn, where no one but the stable men were suffered to see the effects she aimed at.  But on the eve of realizing these in public she was overwhelmed by disaster.  The crowning glory of her composition was to be a young girl standing on the highest seat of the coach, in the character of the Spirit of Summer, wreathed and garlanded with flowers, and invisibly sustained by the twelve months of the year, equally divided as to sex, but with the more difficult and painful attitudes assigned to the gentlemen who were to figure as the fall and winter months.  It had been all worked out and the actors drilled in their parts, when the Spirit of Summer, who had been chosen for the inoffensiveness of her extreme youth, was taken with mumps, and withdrawn by the doctor’s orders.  Mrs. Milray had now not only to improvise another Spirit of Summer, but had to choose her from a group of young ladies, with the chance of alienating and embittering those who were not chosen.  In her calamity she asked her husband what she should do, with but the least hope that he could tell her.  But he answered promptly, “Take Clementina; I’ll let you have her for the day,” and then waited for the storm of her renunciations and denunciations to spend itself.

“To be sure,” she said, when this had happened, “it isn’t as if she were a servant in the house; and the position can be regarded as a kind of public function, anyhow.  I can’t say that I’ve hired her to take the part, but I can give her a present afterwards, and it will be the same thing.”

The question of clothes for Clementina Mrs. Milray declared was almost as sweeping in its implication as the question of the child’s creation.”  She has got to be dressed new from head to foot,” she said, “every stitch, and how am I to manage it in twenty-four hours?”