The necessity of readjusting our way of life to Tommy's new status of proprietor, and moving in over the store, kept my plans for the dramatic exploitation of Higgleston in abeyance. It seemed however by as much as I was now bound up with the interest of the community, to put me on a better footing for beginning it, and on Decoration Day, walking in the cemetery under the bright boughs, between the flowery mounds, the Gift stirred in me, played upon by this touching dramatization of common human pain and loss. I recalled that it was just such solemn festivals of the people that I had had in mind to lay hold on and make the medium of a profounder appreciation. And the next one about to present itself as an occasion was the Fourth of July.
I detached myself from Tommy long enough to make my way around to two or three of the ladies who usually served on the committee.
"We ought to have a meeting soon now," I suggested; "it will take all of a month to get the children ready."
"That's what we thought," agreed Mrs. Miller heavily. "They was to our house Thursday——" She went on to tell me who was to read the Declaration and who deliver the oration.
"But," I protested, "that's exactly what they've had every Fourth these twenty years!"
"Well, I guess," said Mrs. Harvey, "if Higgleston people want that kind of a celebration, they've a right to have it."
"I guess they have," Mrs. Miller agreed with her.
They had always rather held it out against me at Higgleston that I had never taken the village squabbles seriously, that I was reconciled too quickly for a proper sense of their proportions, and they must have reckoned without this quality in me now, for I was so far from realizing the deliberateness of the slight, that I thought I would go around on the way home and see our minister; perhaps he could do something. It appeared simply ridiculous that Higgleston shouldn't have the newest of this sort of thing when it was there for the asking.
I found him raking the garden in his third best suit and the impossible sort of hat affected by professional men in their more human occasions. The moment I flashed out at him with my question about the committee, he fell at once into a manner of ministerial equivocation—the air of being man enough to know he was doing a mean thing without being man enough to avoid doing it. Er ... yes, he believed there had been a meeting ... he hadn't realized that I was expecting to be notified. I wasn't a regular member, was I?
"No," I admitted, "but last year——" The intention of the slight began to dawn on me.