There is no doubt that the formal rebellion of Mrs. Worthington, Duchess of Grand Rapids, and known of the town's nobility as the Pretender, began with the hospital contest. The Pretender planted her siege-guns before the walls of the temple of the priestess, and prepared for business. The first manoeuver made by the beleaguered one was to give a luncheon in the mosque, at which, though it was midwinter, fresh tomatoes and fresh strawberries were served, and a real authoress from Boston talked upon John Fiske's philosophy and, in the presence of the admiring guests, made a new kind of salad dressing for the fresh lettuce and tomatoes. Thirty women who watched her forgot what John Fiske's theory of the cosmos is, and thirty husbands who afterward ate that salad dressing have learned to suffer and be strong. But that salad dressing undermined the faith of thirty mere men--raw outlanders to be sure--in the social omniscience of Priscilla Winthrop. Of course they did not see it made; the spell of the enchantress was not over them; but in their homes they maintained that if Priscilla Winthrop didn't know any more about cosmic philosophy than to pay a woman forty dollars to make a salad dressing like that--and the whole town knows that was the price--the vaunted town of Duxbury, Massachusetts, with its old furniture and new culture, which Priscilla spoke of in such repressed ecstasy, is probably no better than Manitou, Colorado, where they get their Indian goods from Buffalo, New York. Such is the perverse reasoning of man. And Mrs. Worthington, having lived with considerable of a man for fifteen years, hearing echoes of this sedition, attacked the fortification of the faithful on its weakest side. She invited the thirty seditious husbands with their wives to a beefsteak dinner, where she heaped their plates with planked sirloin, garnished the sirloin with big, fat, fresh mushrooms, and topped off the meal with a mince pie of her own concoction, which would make a man leave home to follow it. She passed cigars at the table, and after the guests went into the music-room ten old men with ten old fiddles appeared and contested with old-fashioned tunes for a prize, after which the company danced four quadrilles and a Virginia reel. The men threw down their arms going home and went over in a body to the Pretender. But in a social conflict men are mere non-combatants, and their surrender did not seriously injure the cause that they deserted.