It is the one time too when Old Skinflint Holden gets from his fellow citizens and neighbors a certain grave respect, for they all know that on the morrow among the men in blue will be this same Old Skinflint Holden with a medal on his breast.
Though every preparation has seemingly been made days ago, still that last night before the event is the very busiest time of all.
Joe Baldwin's little shop is crowded. Jake Tuttle is there with the four children, buying them the fanciest of footgear for the morrow. The two Miller boys, who work in the creamery until nine every night but have special leave this day to purchase holiday necessities, are standing awkwardly near Joe's side door and waiting patiently for Frankie Stevens and Dora Langely, better known as "Central," to depart with their black velvet slippers, before making any effort to have Joe try his wares on their awkward feet. Little Johnny Peterson comes in to inquire if Joe has sewed the buttons on his, Johnny's, shoes, and Martha Gray has a hard time trying to decide which of two pairs of moccasins are most becoming to her youngest baby. Any number of youths are hanging about waiting for Joe to get around to selling them a box of his best shoe polish and some, getting impatient, wait on themselves. Joe, with his spectacles pushed up into his hair, is rushing around from customer to customer and through it all is dimly conscious of the fact that outside under the awning Dolly Beatty is waiting anxiously for the men folks to get out before she ventures in to buy her Joe's special brand of corn salve and bunion plaster.
And so it is all the way down Main Street. In the gents' furnishings' corner of Peter Sweeney's dry-goods store Seth Curtis is buying a new hat, a little jaunty hat that seems to fit his head well enough but doesn't somehow become the rest of him. Seth looks best in a cap and always wears one except, of course, on such state occasions as the coming one. He asks the Longman boys how he looks in the brown fedora Pete has just put on his head and Max Longman laughs and wants to know what difference it makes how a married man with a bald spot looks. Then he turns away to pick out carefully the kind of tie that will make him most pleasing in Clara's sight on the morrow.
In the ladies' department of that same store Jocelyn Brownlee is asking for long, white silk gloves. A little hush falls on the crowd of feminine shoppers as Mrs. Pete gets the stepladder, mounts it and brings down with a good deal of visible pride a pasteboard box containing six pairs of white silk gloves that Pete bought three years ago in a moment of incomprehensible madness, a thing which Mrs. Pete has never until this minute forgiven him.
Jocelyn, pretty, eager, unaffected, selects the very first pair and is wholly unconscious of the stir she has made. It is only when David Allan comes up and asks her if she is ready that she becomes confused and conscious of the watching eyes of the other buyers.
She has promised to go to the Decoration Day exercises with David and has hurried to buy gloves for the occasion not knowing, in her city innocence, that gloves aren't the style in Green Valley, leastways not for any outdoor festival.
David watches the gloves being wrapped up and that reminds him that it wouldn't hurt to buy a new buggy whip, one of the smart ones with the bit of red, white and blue ribbon on its tip that he saw standing in Dick's window.
So he and Jocelyn go off together to get the whip. It is the first time that Jocelyn has been out in the village streets after nightfall and she looks about her with eager eyes.
"My—how pretty the streets look and sound! It's ever so much prettier than village street scenes on the stage!" she confides to David. And David laughs and takes her over to Martin's for a soda and then, because it is still early, he coaxes her to walk about town with him and as a final treat they stop in front of Mary Langely's millinery shop.