Cherry sat next to Ethel on the grandstand and to me she looked distraught. She had little to say and I, with my usual habit of adding two to two, made up my mind that she had accepted Hepburn and was now sorry that she had done so. I could not account for her lack of animation in any other way.
I suggested my thoughts to Ethel but she said they were nonsensical; that Cherry was very sorry to have to leave the place; that she had become attached to Clover Lodge and that she hated the thought of going up to her aunt at Bar Harbor.
She recovered her spirits in the “Mammoth Restaurant.” The long tables were so unlike anything to which she had been accustomed that the very novelty pleased her, and as we were all together at one end we were able to do and say pretty much what we wanted and we were a gay crowd.
We had met pretty nearly everybody we had ever seen in the Egertons, and we had bid good bye to old Mrs. Hartlett just before the races began.
She having a mind to try a new sensation and one that would have been impossible in her childhood, had come over with her physician in his electric run-about and it was something of a shock to see the dainty little old lady accustomed to move slowly and with dignity perched up in one of the fastest things on wheels, but it was just such open-mindedness that had enabled her to remain young for one hundred years and we bade her good bye quite sure that she at least would be in Egerton another summer whoever else might drop by the way.
Minerva was in her element all day long. A crowd was a crowd after all even if it was composed of country people, and she kept herself and James in the thick of it.
Once we saw her treating six strange little darkey boys and girls to pink lemonade and once I saw her by a happy fluke throw a left-handed ball at the colored man who was soliciting tries at his hard head and she hit him fair and square and then hit the crowd by her hearty, carefree laughter.
There was one little incident connected with Minerva’s day at the fair that might have been serious if Minerva’s star had not been in the ascendant when she herself was.
A balloon ascension had been advertised for the afternoon and Ethel had wanted to go over and see it, but I told her that the filling of balloons by gas was always a slow process and that we’d see it when it went up.
Now, James was more gallant, and when Minerva asked him to take her to see the balloon go up he took her to the very spot.