The performance created small notice outside the choir.
Hiram was around at that little back entrance in a twinkling, his good-natured, sunburnt face a picture of devoted anxiety. Neva was sitting on the steps shaking with a considerable degree of suppressed emotion, but not looking particularly ill, and insisting that her mother and Aunt Delia should go on back and hear the sermon to its end, if, indeed, it had an end. This they did, after seeing Hiram place Neva carefully in his buggy and start off home; but they failed to reach the choir in time to see the whisperings which had passed between two of Neva's rivals who sat there, and who were not unobservant of the peculiar nature of her fainting-spell.
"It wasn't like any faint I ever saw before," some one openly declared to Mrs. Sullivan after the service was over, whereupon the whisperings between the rivals were renewed; and several days thereafter the townspeople were frankly discussing Neva Sullivan's "spell."
In less than a week after the incident which I have just related, because there is absolutely nothing of my own happening that is worth relating, Neva ran over one day in a great flurry of excitement to consult my expert judgment as to what she should wear that night, as a young gentleman from the city had come down to see her and was coming out that evening to call.
"A young gentleman from the city! How exciting!" I congratulated her. "But I didn't know you knew any of the Beau Brummels up there!"
"That's the curious part of it," she explained as she sat down and panted a little, for she had run across the road and up our long walk. "I don't know him—never heard of him before. But he telephoned me from the hotel this afternoon that he had heard of me and had come down to see me on business. His name is Doctor Simmons, and he said he was very anxious to see me at once and give me some professional literature."
"Some professional what?" I asked, for she was talking very fast, and her enunciation at best is not like a normal school teacher's.
"Professional literature," she repeated, lingering over the words this time as if they were chocolate creams. "I told mamma maybe he is a poet. It sounded kinder like it, you know—him saying 'literature.'"
"I don't believe that poets carry around professional literature," I said, trying to let her down easy, for she is a sad little visionary—and somehow I have a sympathy for visionaries. But he was a man, a new man, even though he might not be a poet, so Neva's solicitude concerning him was in nowise dampened.
"Well, that's what he said—'professional literature,'" she kept on flutteringly—inconstant little minx, when only a week ago she had disturbed "public worship" for the sake of driving home in Hiram Ellis' buggy!—"So mamma said I better come on over and ask you how I ought to dress to see him; and oh, how I ought to have the parlor fixed! You go up to the city so often, of course you know all the swell ways."