AT five o’clock Maria and Aunt Gerty arrived on the scene. Blackhampton’s future mayoress had been taken very firmly in hand by her step-sister who was fully determined that the social credit of Alderman Munt should not be lowered in the sight of the world. Gerty had really taken enormous pains with a naturally timid and weakly constituted member of society.

After a battle royal, in which tears had been shed, the hapless Maria had been compelled to renounce a pair of old-fashioned stays which on common occasions foreshortened her figure to the verge of the grotesque, in favor of sinuous, long-lined, straight-fronted corsets. With such ruthless art had outlying and overlapping portions of Maria been folded away within their fashionable confines, that, as she breathlessly remarked to her torturer as she looked in the glass, “She didn’t know herself, she didn’t really.”

Maria could hardly breathe as she waddled across the parched expanse of Jubilee Park. She was more miserably self-conscious than she had ever been in the whole course of a miserably self-conscious existence. Her corsets, she was sure, filled the world’s eye. At her time of life to take such liberties with the human form was hardly decent, it wasn’t really. Moreover Gerty had perched a great hat on the top of her, almost a flower show in itself, the sort that was worn, Gerty assured her, by the local duchess on public occasions; and it was kept in place on a miraculous new-fangled coiffure by a white veil with black spots. Then her comfortable elastic-sided boots, the stand-bys of a fairly long and very honorable life, had gone by the board at the instance of the ruthless Gerty. She had to submit to patent leathered, buckled affairs, that could only be coaxed on to the human foot by a shoehorn. No wonder that Mrs. Alderman Munt walked with great delicacy across the baking expanse of Jubilee Park. And the intensely respectable black kid gloves that for more than half a century had served her so well for chapel goings, prayer meetings, weddings, funerals, christenings and the concerts of the Philharmonic Society had been forced to yield to a pair whose virgin whiteness in Maria’s opinion carried fashion to the verge of immodesty. Nor did even these complete the catalogue of Gerty’s encroachments. There was also a long-handled black and white parasol.

As Maria and Gerty debouched across the grass, Josiah arose from his chair in the midst of the committee and strutted impressively past the bandstand to receive them.

“Why, Mother, I hardly knew you.” There was high approval in the greeting. “Up to the knocker, what!” He offered a cordial hand to his heroically beaming sister-in-law, “How are you, Gert?”

The ladies had been careful to have tea before they came but this precaution did not avail. Josiah insisted on their going into the special tent labeled “Refreshments.” Here they had to sit on a form rickety and uncomfortably narrow which promised at any moment either to lay them prone beneath the tea urn or enable them to form a parabola over against the patent bread-cutter at the other end of the table.

The tea was lukewarm and undrinkable, the bread and butter was thick and so uninviting that both ladies were sure it was margarine, but after a moment’s hesitation in which she felt the stern eye of Josiah upon her, the heroic Gerty dexterously removed one white glove and came to grips with a plate of buttered buns. In the buns were undeniable currants, and their genial presence enabled Gerty to make a spirited bluff at consuming them.

Where Gerty walked, Maria must not fear to tread. The ladies got somehow through their second tea and then they were haled into the open, past the bandstand and through the crowd surrounding it, to the large tent containing the exhibits. Here, in a select corner, draped with festoons of red cloth, were the prizes which Maria, half an hour hence, would be called upon to distribute with her own white-gloved hands to the victorious competitors.

The heat in the tent being unbearable the President’s party had it to themselves. Therefore Maria’s audible groan at the sight of the task before her was heard by none save her lord.

“Bear up, Mother,” Josiah’s tone was a highly judicious blend of sternness, banter and persuasion. “It’s not as if you had to make a speech, you know. And if you did have there’s nobody here who’d bite you. I’d see to that.”

This was encouraging, yet certain gyrations of the black and white parasol betrayed to the lynx-eyed Gerty the sinister presence of stage fright. “Maria,” said the inexorable monitress, “you must show Spirit. Hold your sunshade as I’ve shown you. Keep your chin up. And try to smile.”

This counsel of perfection was, at the moment, clearly beyond Maria. But the President’s nod approved it, and Gerty, one of those powerful spirits that loves to do with public affairs, proceeded on a flute-like note, “Dear me, what lovely prizes!”

It was hyperbole to speak of the prizes as lovely, but it was, of course, the correct thing to say, and in the ear of Josiah the correct thing was said in the correct way. It would have been difficult for the duchess herself to have bettered that pure note of lofty enthusiasm.

“Not so bad, Gert, are they? What do you think o’ that little vawse? Presented by Coppin, the jeweler.”

To assess the gift of Coppin, the jeweler, it was necessary for Miss Preston to bring into action her famous tortoiseshell folders. She had no need for glasses at all. But Lawyer Mossop’s aunt, the late Miss Selina Gregg, had aroused in her a passion for their use on appropriate occasions. “A ducky little vahse!” That vexed word was pronounced after the manner of the late Miss Gregg, from whose practice there was no appeal.

”Not so bad—for Coppin. Better anyway than his silver-plated eggstand last year.”

Gerty made an admiring survey of the bounty of the patrons of the Blackhampton Rose Growers’ Association. “And here, I see, is the President’s special prize.” She had kept in reserve her appreciation of this chef d’oeuvre of public munificence, a much beribboned silver gilt goblet to which a card was attached, “President’s Special Prize for Rose of Purest Color. Donor Alderman Munt J.P.” It was the first thing her eye had lit on, but she had worked up to it slowly, via the lesser gifts of lesser men, so that anything in the nature of anticlimax might be avoided.

“Josiah, tell me, who is the fortunate winner?” The archness of the tone verged upon coquetry.

“Look and see, my gel.” The response was unexpectedly gruff. But, as soon as Gerty had looked and seen, the reason for the President’s austerity grew clear. On a second card, smaller but beribboned like the first, was inscribed in a fair clerkly hand, “Presented to Mr. W. Hollis for Exhibit 16.”

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