Miss Gibbie Gault

by Kate Langley Bosher

"So is Miss Gibbie Gault." Mrs. Tate, who was making tatting on her fingers with Mrs. Burnham's cotton, looked up. "Miss Gibbie is certainly her friend, but I don't suppose anybody would waste time thinking she was doing all these things."

"I imagine not!" Mrs. Pryor's voice was decisive. Then her face changed, and with an expression suitable to recent affliction she folded her hands and shook her head.

"It is, indeed, distressing," she began, "to see a young girl so defy public opinion as Mary Cary does. For over a year she has been back in Yorkburg, and save for the weeks she was away on a summer holiday there has been no one of them in which she has not been discussed whenever two or three have met together."

"She certainly has!" Mrs. Tate's assent was eager, if undesired. "Her coming back has been like the raising of the dead. If there ever was a dull place, it was this one before she came. Somehow since she got here things look like they've taken a tonic, and so do we. Mary always did have a way of making you sit up and take notice and enjoying yourself."

Mrs. Pryor touched the bell. "As I was saying, Mary Cary is one of the people—I say it in all charitableness—who will always be talked about, just as—just as—"

"The sun would be talked about if it came out at night." Mrs. Tate felt no grudge and helped out willingly.

"Just as anybody would be talked about who is so very—very alive. I am sure she means well, but it is the Christian duty of some one to point out to her the mistakes she is making. She is spending money freely. Where does it come from?" Mrs. Pryor forgot her weeds, and her voice was the voice of the May meeting. "Where does that mysterious money come from? Everybody knows Gibbie Gault has money, but has anybody ever known her to give a dollar of it away? Go to her when you will and ask her to subscribe to this or contribute to that and she waves you out. Who has ever seen her name on any list of givers to anything. The money her father left her has increased enormously in value I've been told. She's a good business woman. Nobody denies that, but what will she present to her Maker when she stands before Him at the bar of judgment. And what are the words which she will hear?"

"Couldn't any of us guess that." Miss Mittie Muncaster went up to the grate and put on a large lump of coal. "I reckon a good many people would like to know what other people are going to have said to them at the bar of judgment. The thought of hell is a great comfort to some people. I certainly am glad the Lord's got to judge me, and not women. But, speaking of Mary Cary, I hear she's awfully worried about Lily's running away. She thinks it was so disrespectful to her mother not to tell her first and run afterward, if her mother still held out. Mary don't know Mrs. Deford. Lily wanted to take her head with her when she ran. There are mothers and mothers, and Mrs. Deford isn't the kind Mary keeps in her heart. I bet she gives it to John when she sees him."

"Since this Mr. Fielding has been here, no one sees John with Mary any more." Mrs. Corbin put her needle between her lips. "Who is this Mr. Fielding? I don't like his looks a bit. He's never been here before."

Miss Honoria Brockenborough got up to go. Her lorgnette, the only one in town except Mrs. Deford's, was held to her eyes, and for a moment she looked at Mrs. Corbin.