A flutter stirred the entire company. The ladies looked at each other, and then with one accord turned their regards upon the Hon. Mrs. Hoyt, as one who, having got them into this difficulty, was in honor bound to help them out of it. "I supposed everybody knew," that lady remarked, with icy sweetness, "that the rules of making motions do not have to be in the by-laws. They are in"--the speaker hesitated, not being exactly sure of the title of the volume to which her husband had given so careful attention when expecting to be nominated: feeling, however, that anything was better than the appearance of ignorance, she went on precipitately--"in 'Pole's Manual.'" Even Miss Sharp had no retort adequate to meet this crushing appeal to authority, not being sufficiently well informed to connect Pole with whist, so she contented herself by observing, with a sniff, that for her part she was glad she did not know so much as some people pretended to. "It does seem to me," observed Mrs. Henderson, at this point, "that we might let this one year go by without a fair. There's been so much sickness in Rosedale this winter that everybody is tired out, and we had a great deal better wait till June, and have a strawberry-festival. I move we put the whole thing off till then." "Second the motion," cried Miss Snob, with great promptitude. "I cannot consent to put that motion," the president said, with great dignity. "We have made up our minds to have a fair now, and we might as well have it, and be done with it." "I move," Mrs. Browne put in sweetly, with the intention of suiting everybody, "that we have a fair _and_ a strawberry-festival." Miss Snob seconded this motion with her customary enthusiasm. "It is moved and seconded," the president said, "that we have a fair and a strawberry-festival. But that seems a great deal; and I think I had better declare it not a vote, unless doubted." Nobody was clear about the effects of doubting a negative proposition; but Mrs. Crowler was pleased to observe, "Well, any way, now I come to think it over, I think, on the whole, I won't be on the arrangements committee at all; but I'll be chairman of the finance committee when that is fixed,--and that'll leave only three on the arrangements." This moved Mrs. Henderson to resign, and Mrs. Lowell following her example, Mrs. Hoyt was left in solitary grandeur upon the committee. Matters were not improved, moreover, when Miss Keene remarked, "If we've voted 'the previous question,' I don't see but we've still got to fix the day. All that is undone now." "Certainly," responded the Hon. Mrs. Sampson Hoyt, with the virtuous joy of an iconoclast gazing on the ruin he has wrought. "We don't seem to have anything exactly fixed," the president said, with a helpless and conciliatory smile. "If somebody would make a motion--" "It's too late to make any more motions to-day," Miss Sharp interrupted, with much vigor. "It's ten minutes of six."