The big room at King's Warren Parsonage was already fairly well filled. Old Mrs. Wurzel and the buxom but not too well-favoured heiress of the house of Grains were at the head of the table. Old Mrs. Wurzel was a personage in her way; she it was who made the annual contract with the local linen-draper; she it was who, as an adept learned in the art, officiated at the awful ceremony of "cutting-out"; she it was who, with infinite trouble, obtained for the school children those antiquated straw bonnets of a forgotten type, which were the despair of the juvenile village beauties. She herself had worn them in her youth, and they were the proper bonnets for "growing girls." But, alas! Nemesis had arrived; the head coverings worn in country places thirty years ago had become once more the fashion, and the little maids from school had been voted by Spunyarn "quite smart people." It was Mrs. Wurzel who with her own fair but energetic hands had, with her famous cutting-out scissors, shorn away the luxuriant but obnoxious fringe which Jemima Ann Blogg, the poacher's daughter, had appeared in at the Confirmation. Jemima Ann had violently resisted, but her struggles were in vain; in this case the sheep had not been dumb when in the hands of the shearer: the daughter of the village Radical had returned to her father's roof weeping, but shorn. It is true that old Mrs. Wurzel had reluctantly paid to Blogg the sum of five pounds, under the threat of a summons for assault, but the honest fellow had honourably kept her secret as he had promised, and Mrs. Wurzel's reputation, as the champion of virtue and respectability, had in no way suffered, though she had paid her five pounds for it. The vicar's wife, whose principal characteristics were her interest in missionary work and the saliency of her angles, was a mere priestess in the little circle of which old Mrs. Wurzel was the permanent archdruidess. Vicars' wives had come and gone, but all had submitted, some after a brief struggle, to old Mrs. Wurzel's sway. But Mrs. Dodd, the present vicar's wife, retained the precious prerogative of choosing the book to be read at the monthly Dorcas. Mrs. Dodd's choice was invariably the biography of some missionary; and she did her best to carry out the idea that a Dorcas meeting should provide self-mortification for the ladies present, in the shape of coarse work for the fingers and repellent reading for the mind.