Dr. Wells, Roseborough’s highly trusted physician—a doctor of the old school and a man who loved his joke (no matter who else loved it not)—was fond of saying that the difference between Jacob Pelham-Hew and his namesake in the Old Testament was that Jacob of the Bible waited seven years for one damsel whereas Jacob Pelham-Hew had seven damsels waiting for one man—a witticism considered very funny by everyone in Roseborough but the Pelham-Hews.
In the wake of the ice-cream cart came a scrawny sorrel, drawing a sulky. Miss Graham sat in the one bowl-shaped seat, very erect and mannish in demeanour with a tan coat over her white duck dress and sporting a “choker” with a gold horseshoe pin. Miss Imogen Graham let it be known that she was well able to take care of herself and despised men; indeed, she would not look at one, save to be courteous. That courtesy was the keystone of her character was at once made evident if there was a man in the room, for he never lacked her company.
Miss Palametta Watts and her mother in their phaeton brought up the rear. Miss Palametta was small—“a lean, simpering wisp of a thing,” Mrs. Witherby called her. She possessed two brown eyes, with fairly good possibilities in the line of flirtation, and a bang of curly, brown hair that had received its first baptism of walnut tea—what is called “touching up”—just above the ears and at the long ends. Miss Palametta was arch. Some one had once told her that there was something birdlike in the little tosses and dartings of her head on her long throat, with the unfortunate result that her head was now never still a moment and she twittered incessantly. Her mother, who was very fat and nearly stone deaf, accompanied her everywhere; for, as Miss Palametta said, she would not for worlds be classed with forward, modern women who showed themselves in public, unchaperoned. Under cover of her mother’s deafness, the modest creature had practically proposed to every eligible man in Roseborough; and had so compromised one poor fellow that he fled to Trenton, and became a bank clerk, to escape the condemnation Roseborough heaped on any man who went so far and then refused his destiny.
Rosamond’s surprise had turned to alarm by the time the Watts’ chariot hove in sight.
“I’m not at home,” she muttered, blankly. “I am not at home.”
What could be the cause of this white-starched avalanche descending upon her out of four creaking rigs? She was not left long in doubt.
“We’ve come to hear all about the new man!” they chorused, in running up the steps to her. “Mrs. Witherby says a new man is coming to Roseborough and you know all about him.”
“I—er—I—I don’t know anything about him,” she stammered to the eager, glittered-eyed ones, cramming her in on every side.
“Oh, yes, you do! You’ve been told everything,” Elspeth MacMillan shrilled in her ear from behind.
“His name is Jack Falcon and he used to go to Charleroy,” her sister, Jeanie Deans MacMillan, supplemented from in front. “Mrs. Witherby says so.”