Mr. Peaslee was putting on his coat. "Well," he said, "I kind o' thought I'd step over to Ed'ards's. I thought mebbe he'd be interested." "Goin' to brag, are ye?" was his wife's remorseless comment. "Much good it'll do ye, talkin' to that hatchet-face. He ain't so pious as he looks, if all stories are true." But Mr. Peaslee was already outside the door. She raised her voice shrilly. "You be back, now; them chickens has got to be fed!" Mr. Peaslee sought a more sympathetic audience. Being drawn for the grand jury had greatly flattered his vanity, for it encouraged a secret ambition which he had long held to get into public life. Service on the grand jury might lead to his becoming selectman, perhaps justice of the peace, perhaps town representative from Ellmington--who knew what else? He looked down a pleasant vista of increasing office, at the end of which stood the state capitol. He could be senator, perhaps! And he began planning his behavior as juror, the dignified bearing, the well-matured utterances, the shrewd cross-questioning. At the end of his service his neighbors would know him for a man of solid judgment, a "safe" man to be intrusted with weighty affairs. Mr. Peaslee was fifty-three years old. He had a comfortable figure, a clean-shaven, round face, and blue eyes much exaggerated for the spectator by the strong lenses of a pair of great spectacles. These, with his gray hair, gave him a benevolence of aspect which somewhat misrepresented him. As a matter of fact, although good-humored and not without a still surviving capacity for generous impulse, he was only less "near" than his wife. Childishly vain, he bore himself with an air of self-satisfaction not without its charm for humorous neighbors. They said that they guessed he thought himself "some punkins." "Some punkins" most people admitted him to be, although how much of his money and how much of his shrewdness was really his wife's was matter of debate among those who knew him best. At any rate, the Peaslees had made money. A few years before, they had sold their fat farm "down-river" advantageously, and had bought the dignified white house in Ellmington in which they have just been seen eating a dinner which looks as if they were "house poor." That they were not; they had thirty thousand dollars in the local bank, partly invested in its stock. In Ellmington Mrs. Peaslee was less lonely, and through Mr. Peaslee was an unsuspected director in the bank, and a shrewd user of the chances for profitable investment which her husband's association with the "bank crowd" opened to her.