It was a momentous assemblage, that gathering of ladies who responded to the call of their erstwhile social leader, Mrs. Jinnie Hines Cumming. This octogenarian person, about to go away for the summer with her two maids and her six trunks when the idea struck her, delayed her going but declined to have the covers taken off the furniture in her drawing-room.
"Never put yourself out for women," was her explanation of this to Preston Cannon, her nephew. "If they think you overvalue them, they undervalue you, and the other way round for the reverse of the proposition."
Consequently the meeting came to order in due time in Mrs. Cumming's less formal library, which she declared was easier to unswathe and put in order.
Thanks to the beneficent offices of Preston Cannon, right hand for all the ladies concerned in planning the affair, Miss Selina Wistar, Miss Maud Addison and Miss Adele Carter were present, established in the dining-room opening off the library in the combined callings of ushers, pages and tellers. It wasn't strictly parliamentary that they should be there, and years afterwards they turned on him and told him so, but then they were only thrilled and excited and grateful to him for arranging it with Mrs. Cumming.
On the afternoon in question the three wearing immaculate white dresses, and seated at a small table just inside the door leading from the dining-room into the library, with trays of papers and pencils in readiness, watched the ladies surge in, in pairs, trios and groups, and find chairs.
Adele leaned across to speak to Maud and Selina. She had on a white sailor hat with scarlet cherries on it, fruit being the rage in millinery this season, a jaunty type which didn't at all suit her. "How would it do to take some notes of the meeting for Mrs. Bruce and Mrs. Higginson? They'll want to know everything." Conscientious Adele!
Maud looked stunning in her new white hat with crystallized grapes on it. "Better than that," she whispered in reply, "Selina and I are going to telegraph 'em when the meeting's over. We have their address."
Selina had been considerably worried over Mamma's extravagance for her this spring, but since she could not combat it, looked rather nice herself in a soft-brimmed leghorn with a wreath of strawberries, both blossoms and fruit, upon it. She leaned across the table in her turn. "We're going to the telegraph office before we go home. Come with us. Thanks to Maud the message is written out in telling style."
"I felt it was a significant moment," said Maud, "a moment we may be proud to feel we witnessed. And I felt the message ought to be epigrammatic in a way and worthy of it. Read it, Selina."