With that she swept out of the hall. She was down on the register as having passed her seventy-third birthday, and anyway, she mused, she had always preferred a yard full of chickens to a yard full of flowers, because chickens are more lively. They keep you better company, she said. Then, with or without verbal excuse, one woman after another left the hall. There were two with the deplorable squint, several far on the shaded side of seventy, some who wore honest wigs, and some too honest to proclaim either that they did not dye their hair or that they had never sniffed at the contents of a snuffbox. Then there were the dear old ladies loyal to their dead husbands, the old ladies who did not care to give up the serene, uneventful security of the Old Ladies’ Home for a house shared only with a man afflicted with lumbago and very decided notions. However, ten remained, openly ashamed, yet not sufficiently ashamed to reject Samuel Jessup’s hand before they had seen him. “It don’t mean that none of us promise to take him, oh no!” said Mrs. Young, a woman living in the memories of her long reign as a belle. “It only means that we’d like to get a good look at him. We’ve had plenty of chances all our lives. We ain’t none of us here because no man wanted us—neither us widders nor us maidens. We’re here from ch’ice, Miss Jessica, from _ch’ice_! But still if there’s another ch’ice open to us with a real, kind honest man—his letter shows he’s that, bless his heart!—we’d each of us ten like to have one tenth of a show at him.” Then, greatly flustered at having spoken with such unmaidenly freedom on such a subject, Mrs. Young moved away from the desk across the hall and out of doors, where she could take a good long breath. After she had gone, one of the nine remaining candidates wondered aloud how Mrs. Young would look without her false front, for of course no one would deceive Samuel Jessup as to her quantity of hair. “But the rest of it?” whispered another. “You can’t wash all that dye off in one day, can you?” “Waal!” retorted a third, coming hotly to Mrs. Young’s rescue, “a man who wears a wig hasn’t no right ter be so particular.” Said the first one firmly: “She shouldn’t deceive him.” Answered a third: “Deceive him all she wants ter as long as it’s in somethin’ no man would have wit enough ter find out.” At three o’clock to the minute, Samuel Jessup appeared, emerging from a closed coach together with a plump middle-aged woman who carried with extraordinary care a large market basket covered with a red tablecloth. “Good gracious!” exclaimed Mrs. Young, peeking with half the household from the upper hall windows. “He’s been an’ picked up a wife on the road an’ come to offer his apologies.”