Selina produced it from her pocket-book and read it softly, the library filling rapidly with ladies by now:
Organization effected. Mrs. Cumming responsible. Congratulations. Our rights and our realms our platform.
It was a representative gathering, this, in the library of old Mrs. Cumming. Summer silks, summer grenadines, buntings, and this latest thing, French satines, abounded. While fashion this season decreed trains which swept pavements and floors impassively, the marked characteristic of the hour was bustles. And if bonnets predominated over hats, the bonnets made up for any over-sedateness in form by their wealth in that rage of the moment mentioned, fruit in every shape known to millinery if not to pomology.
Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle was there, Mrs. Alicia Tuttle Jones was there, and also Mrs. Jones' three married stepdaughters. Mrs. William Williams was there, and Mrs. Carter, mother of Adele, and Mrs. Grosvenor, her grandmother, Mrs. Harrison, very lovely and very charming and smiling, Mrs. Addison, Mrs. Caldwell, Selina's little mother, Mrs. Wistar, and Auntie and Cousin Anna Tomlinson. And besides these, serried ranks of others even the more impressive because the less well known.
"Mrs. Cumming ordered a hundred chairs from the undertaker's, though she wouldn't have this known, every confectioner in town chancing to have his engaged for this afternoon or this evening, I know that," whispered Selina to Maud and Adele, "for Mr. Cannon said so, and there are just ten vacant."
Here Mrs. Jinnie Cumming rose from her chair in the front row of the audience, tottery but equal to it, game old girl, as Preston Cannon said of her. And deliberately reading the instructions furnished her by her nephew through her lorgnette after she had risen, found what she wanted, asked somebody near by to pound a chair back, and call the meeting to order.
Having gotten it to order, and its attention fixed on herself, she told the ninety ladies gathered in her library that they knew as well as she did what they were there for, or ought to know if they had read the card she'd sent 'em. And thereupon asked Mrs. Alicia Tuttle Jones to take the chair.
Mrs. Jones in grenadine, trained and bustled, and red blackberries, had prepared herself for this, so it was understood afterwards, having been told beforehand. She swung matters deftly along from this point, being a capable person and a Tuttle. When Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle in turn should pass the social scepter to the next in line, there was very little doubt as to who hoped to be qualified to receive it.
With a few graceful phrases explaining the reasons for their presence here this afternoon, Mrs. Jones appointed a secretary, and this done came to the point.
"Since we are here, because we are really interested, ladies, will someone tell us a little of what women are doing elsewhere?"