Miss Snob seconded this motion with her customary enthusiasm.
“It is moved and seconded,” the president said, “that we have a fair and a strawberry-festival. But that seems a great deal; and I think I had better declare it not a vote, unless doubted.”
Nobody was clear about the effects of doubting a negative proposition; but Mrs. Crowler was pleased to observe, “Well, any way, now I come to think it over, I think, on the whole, I won’t be on the arrangements committee at all; but I’ll be chairman of the finance committee when that is fixed,—and that’ll leave only three on the arrangements.”
This moved Mrs. Henderson to resign, and Mrs. Lowell following her example, Mrs. Hoyt was left in solitary grandeur upon the committee.
Matters were not improved, moreover, when Miss Keene remarked, “If we’ve voted ‘the previous question,’ I don’t see but we’ve still got to fix the day. All that is undone now.”
“Certainly,” responded the Hon. Mrs. Sampson Hoyt, with the virtuous joy of an iconoclast gazing on the ruin he has wrought.
“We don’t seem to have anything exactly fixed,” the president said, with a helpless and conciliatory smile. “If somebody would make a motion—”
“It’s too late to make any more motions to-day,” Miss Sharp interrupted, with much vigor. “It’s ten minutes of six.”
At this announcement of the lateness of the hour, the entire company started to their feet in dismay; and although, when the president and secretary tried next day to remember what had been done, that the latter might make up her report, they recorded that the meeting adjourned, that statement must be regarded as having been purely a parliamentary fiction, entered in the secretary’s book to gratify that instinct innate in woman’s breast to follow exactly the regular and strictest forms of recognized rules of order.