"Better waste away and die than decay in ideals and traditions and heritage!" Miss Lizzie Bettie looked around the room. "Here we are educating everything in Yorkburg. Next year two new handsome schools will be opened and filled with the riffraff of the town. What are we going to do with them after they're educated? Our streets have been torn up for months—"
"But they'll be lovely when finished." Mrs. Corbin laid down her work. "You know yourself, Lizzie Bettie, how Mary Cary fought for brick pavements instead of asphalt, because she said they suited Yorkburg better. And you know how she's worked to save all the old things and have the new ones to suit. In a few years this will be the prettiest town in the country. That Mr. Black who bought those ugly old shacks and stores, and pulled them down, making pretty open spaces of their lots, certainly has been a good friend to Yorkburg. I don't care what line he came over. I'm glad he came, and if he would only stay here long enough Mr. Corbin and I surely would ask him to tea."
"Who is this Mr. Black?" Mrs. Pryor looked in first one direction and then another." I would like to know something of this mysterious individual who comes here, buys property, pulls down our oldest houses—"
"Oldest eyesores." Mrs. Webb borrowed Mrs. Moon's scissors. "He certainly has put up some pretty old-fashioned-looking houses in their place. I was crazy for one, but Mr. Webb was so slow they were all taken before he spoke." She sighed. "A woman might as well try to move a mountain as to hurry a man when he don't want to do a thing. I've spoken for the next one, if there are any next."
"Who is this Mr. Black?" Again Mrs. Pryor asked the question.
"Nobody knows who he is, but I believe he is John Maxwell."
Miss Puss Jenkins, who had come in late, spoke from her seat near the door, and instinctively all turned toward her.
"John Maxwell!" Half a dozen voices repeated the name, but Miss
Lizzie Bettie Pryor was the first to protest.
"Nonsense!" she said. "How can one man be another? I've seen Mr. Black several times. He's a sharp, shrewd, business-looking man who seems to know Mary Cary very well. Whenever he is in town he spends a good deal of time with her, I hear. He may be acting for somebody else, but it is not John Maxwell. The latter is not the kind of man to let anybody else attend to his business."
"Well, anyhow, I heard somebody say it was John Maxwell who bought those bonds and didn't want anybody to know it." Miss Puss was not to be crushed by Lizzie Bettie Pryor. "Of course, it's all guesswork, but a lot of money has been spent in this place in the last year. Not only on streets and schools and cleaning up and prizes for the prettiest back-yards and trees and things for Milltown, but on people. A dozen people that I know of were sent off on trips during the summer. People who couldn't afford to go. And it was always the same thing Mary Cary would tell. She'd just laugh and say Yorkburg's friend had asked her to do it. Yorkburg's friend never sent me anywhere. Everybody knows John Maxwell is Mary Cary's friend."