“I don’t think we had better do away with everything in this case,” Mrs. Hoyt observed, with a smile of gracious concession. “We might let the committee of arrangements stand.”
“That she’s chairman of,” whispered Mrs. Crowler, spitefully.
“I don’t remember,” observed Miss Sharp, gazing into futurity with an air of abstraction, “that there is anything in the by-laws about the previous question.”
A flutter stirred the entire company. The ladies looked at each other, and then with one accord turned their regards upon the Hon. Mrs. Hoyt, as one who, having got them into this difficulty, was in honor bound to help them out of it.
“I supposed everybody knew,” that lady remarked, with icy sweetness, “that the rules of making motions do not have to be in the by-laws. They are in”—the speaker hesitated, not being exactly sure of the title of the volume to which her husband had given so careful attention when expecting to be nominated: feeling, however, that anything was better than the appearance of ignorance, she went on precipitately—“in ‘Pole’s Manual.’”
Even Miss Sharp had no retort adequate to meet this crushing appeal to authority, not being sufficiently well informed to connect Pole with whist, so she contented herself by observing, with a sniff, that for her part she was glad she did not know so much as some people pretended to.
“It does seem to me,” observed Mrs. Henderson, at this point, “that we might let this one year go by without a fair. There’s been so much sickness in Rosedale this winter that everybody is tired out, and we had a great deal better wait till June, and have a strawberry-festival. I move we put the whole thing off till then.”
“Second the motion,” cried Miss Snob, with great promptitude.
“I cannot consent to put that motion,” the president said, with great dignity. “We have made up our minds to have a fair now, and we might as well have it, and be done with it.”
“I move,” Mrs. Browne put in sweetly, with the intention of suiting everybody, “that we have a fair and a strawberry-festival.”