She was not psychologist enough to understand that it was the very perfection of her memory which was now tripping her up. So many of her clients had for so long demanded the same things so seasonably that she was automatically compelled to carry out commissions that had now lapsed. She was like an actress who knows her part even backwards, but is broken up and confused when cuts are made; finding the too familiar words not to be ousted. Jinny would mechanically purchase items for clients who had forsaken her, and then—so scatterbrained was she become—leave them at other customers’ houses! And on the other hand, she was capable of forgetting the orders of the few faithful. It was thus that under the combined strain of Miss Gentry’s bill, the sultry August weather, the sight of the packed coach and its jaunty driver, the frantic return of Nip with his mocking message, Jinny, whom necessity had compelled to keep Farmer Gale as a customer, clean forgot his urgent need of a wedding-cake. It was not that she had forgotten to order it or even to fetch it from the leading confectioner’s. The sudden union of Farmer Gale with the wealthy land-surveyor’s widow, whose piano-playing had excited the far-off admiration of Elijah Skindle, was too sensational an event, especially to herself, to permit of complete oblivion. It was only that she forgot to deliver the cake at Beacon Chimneys. She was actually within sight of the stag-headed poplars that marked the horizon of home, when, turning her head as Nip suddenly leapt for a rabbit, she saw the great elegant carton in the cart. And the wedding was on the morrow. Conscience-stricken, and morbidly feeling as though the marriage would scarcely be legal without this colossal confection, she resolved, worn out as she was with the heat, to drive back to the house. But she had reckoned without Methusalem. To turn back within the very smell of his stable was unprecedented: it violated every equine code. Like Nip, he now became aware of the instability of things—of a new order. But, more obstinate, he refused to recognize it. Nothing short of the whip—which would have moved him, not out of pain but out of astonishment—could have sufficed to turn him, and how could a mistress who knew him in the right and herself in the wrong, resort to that, especially after such a sultry day? So after every effort to coax him or to lead him by the bridle had failed and almost twenty minutes had been wasted, she decided—in view of her grandfather’s supper—to make a special journey the first thing in the morning. As she gave Methusalem his glad head, she remembered that it was just before the turning to the hymeneal homestead that she had met that scandalously successful coach. III