"What luncheon?" asked Margaret vaguely.
"What luncheon? She asks what luncheon!" exclaimed Mrs. Ocksreider, casting up her eyes in horror. "The Missionary Jubilee Luncheon of course!"
"Oh!" cried Margaret, blushing, for this Missionary Jubilee Luncheon had been an orgy of religious sentimentality in which the entire town had united and nothing else had been talked of for weeks. "I had forgotten all about it. I wasn't out of the house yesterday," she added apologetically.
"But didn't Miss Jennie and Miss Sadie tell you? I remember seeing them in the throngs."
"They didn't speak of it," replied Margaret, not adding the information for which Mrs. Ocksreider yearned, that they did not, these days, tell her anything, since they "did not speak as they passed by."
"But Mrs. Leitzel," pursued Mrs. Ocksreider, "how could you 'forget' a thing like our Missionary Jubilee, unless you were deaf, dumb, and blind?"
"Miss Hamilton never spoke of it to me, and I don't see many other people. The truth is," Margaret owned up, "she and I were not specially interested in it."
"Oh! Why not?"
"Well, I'm inclined to think that the so-called 'heathen' religions are, in most cases, as good as, or better than, the substitute offered by the half-educated missionaries."
"'Half-educated!' Oh, but our missionaries are not half-educated, Mrs. Leitzel!" exclaimed Mrs. Ocksreider, shocked. "Do you know, sometimes I think you are not religious! And one of the women missionaries said yesterday that a woman without religion was like a flower without fragrance, or a landscape without atmosphere."