Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/210

 have greeted with the unstudied ease of long association.

This procession regaled both Main and Washington streets, where Miss Caroline visited our shops to make inconsiderable purchases and many friends. It was a function the pleasant data whereof I was not long in collecting.

Her first conquest was Chester Pierce, our excellent hardware merchant, whom she commissioned to make a needed repair to her range. It was a simple business matter, and Chester Pierce is a simple business person of plain manners. But as he slouched comfortably upon his counter and listened to Miss Caroline's condescending exposition of her needs, he became sensible of a strange influence stealing upon him. By degrees he brought himself erect and slowly, dazedly performed an act which had never before been perpetrated within his establishment. It was not that he deliberated, nor that his reason dictated it; but instinctively, almost from a purely reflex muscular action, he removed his hat while Miss Caroline talked, feeling himself thrill with a foreign and most suave deference. It was customary in our town to raise your hat to a lady on the street; but for a merchant, and a solid citizen at that, to do this thing in his own establishment, was a thing unheard of—and a thing of pretentious and sickening foppery when it was heard of, for that matter, though this need not now concern us.

"And be sure to tell my servant to give you a glass