After a battle royal, in which tears had been shed, the hapless Maria had been compelled to renounce a pair of old-fashioned stays which on common occasions foreshortened her figure to the verge of the grotesque, in favor of sinuous, long-lined, straight-fronted corsets. With such ruthless art had outlying and overlapping portions of Maria been folded away within their fashionable confines, that, as she breathlessly remarked to her torturer as she looked in the glass, "She didn't know herself, she didn't really." Maria could hardly breathe as she waddled across the parched expanse of Jubilee Park. She was more miserably self-conscious than she had ever been in the whole course of a miserably self-conscious existence. Her corsets, she was sure, filled the world's eye. At her time of life to take such liberties with the human form was hardly decent, it wasn't really. Moreover Gerty had perched a great hat on the top of her, almost a flower show in itself, the sort that was worn, Gerty assured her, by the local duchess on public occasions; and it was kept in place on a miraculous new-fangled coiffure by a white veil with black spots. Then her comfortable elastic-sided boots, the stand-bys of a fairly long and very honorable life, had gone by the board at the instance of the ruthless Gerty. She had to submit to patent leathered, buckled affairs, that could only be coaxed on to the human foot by a shoehorn. No wonder that Mrs. Alderman Munt walked with great delicacy across the baking expanse of Jubilee Park. And the intensely respectable black kid gloves that for more than half a century had served her so well for chapel goings, prayer meetings, weddings, funerals, christenings and the concerts of the Philharmonic Society had been forced to yield to a pair whose virgin whiteness in Maria's opinion carried fashion to the verge of immodesty. Nor did even these complete the catalogue of Gerty's encroachments. There was also a long-handled black and white parasol. As Maria and Gerty debouched across the grass, Josiah arose from his chair in the midst of the committee and strutted impressively past the bandstand to receive them. "Why, Mother, I hardly knew you." There was high approval in the greeting. "Up to the knocker, what!" He offered a cordial hand to his heroically beaming sister-in-law, "How are you, Gert?" The ladies had been careful to have tea before they came but this precaution did not avail. Josiah insisted on their going into the special tent labeled "Refreshments." Here they had to sit on a form rickety and uncomfortably narrow which promised at any moment either to lay them prone beneath the tea urn or enable them to form a parabola over against the patent bread-cutter at the other end of the table.