Ah--to be sure; it was today! Kate Clephane laid down the newspaper with a smile. She was recalling Mrs. Minity’s wrath when it had been announced that the reception for the new Bishop was to be given by Mrs. Parley Plush--Mrs. Plush, of all people! Mrs. Minity was not an active member of the Reverend Mr. Merriman’s parochial committees; her bodily inertia, and the haunting fear of what might happen if her coachman tried to turn the horses in the narrow street in which the Rectory stood, debarred her from such participation; but she was nevertheless a pillar of the church, by reason of a small but regular donation to its fund and a large and equally regular commentary on its affairs. Mr. Merriman gave her opinions almost the importance she thought they deserved; and a dozen times in the season Mrs. Merriman was expected to bear the brunt of her criticisms, and persuade her not to give up her pew and stop her subscription. “That woman,” Mrs. Minity would cry, “whom I have taken regularly for a drive once a fortnight all winter, and supplied with brandy-peaches when I had to go without myself!” Mrs. Minity, on the occasion of the last drive, had not failed to tell Mrs. Merriman what she thought of the idea--put forward, of course, by Mrs. Plush herself--of that lady’s being chosen to entertain the new Bishop on his first tour of his diocese. The scandal was bad enough: did Mrs. Merriman want Mrs. Minity to tell her what the woman had been, what her reputation was? No; Mrs. Merriman would rather not. She probably knew well enough herself, if she had chosen to admit it ... but for Mrs. Minity the real bitterness of the situation lay in the fact that she herself could not eclipse Mrs. Plush by giving the reception because she lived in a small flat instead of a large--a vulgarly large--villa. “No; don’t try to explain it away, my dear”; (this to Kate Clephane, the day after Mrs. Merriman had been taken on the latest of her penitential drives); “don’t try to put me off with that Rectory humbug. Everybody at home knows that Mrs. Parley Plush came from Anaconda, Georgia, and everybody in Anaconda knows _what_ she came from. And now, because she has a big showy villa (at least, so they tell me--for naturally I’ve never set foot in it, and never shall); now that she’s been white-washed by those poor simple-minded Merrimans, who have lived in this place for twenty years as if it were a Quaker colony, the woman dares to put herself forward as the proper person--Mrs. Parley Plush _proper_!--to welcome our new Bishop in the name of the American Colony! Well,” said Mrs. Minity in the voice of Cassandra, “if the Bishop knew a quarter of what I do about her--and what I daresay it is my duty, as a member of this diocese, to tell him.... But there: what am I to do, my dear, with a doctor who _absolutely forbids_ all agitating discussions, and warns me that if anybody should say anything disagreeable to me I might be snuffed out on the spot?”