Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/211

 of wine when your work is done," concluded Miss Caroline, as she turned to rustle silkily out. Whereat Chester Pierce, charter member and President of our Sons of Temperance, a man primed with all statistics of the woe resulting traditionally from that first careless glass, murmured words unintelligible but of gratified import, and bowed low after the retreating vision. A moment later he was staring with mystified absorption at the hat in his hands, quite as if the hat were a stranger's—and then he brushed it around and around with the cuff of his coat sleeve as if the stranger had not been careful enough of it.

Thence paraded Miss Caroline to the City Drug Store, to be bowed well out to the sidewalk by young Arthur Updyke when her errand within had been done. But Arthur had attended a college of pharmacy far away from Slocum County, and it was not unnatural that he should exhibit an alien grace in times of emergency.

With Westley Keyts again, to whose shop Miss Caroline next progressed, it was as with Chester Pierce, a phenomenon of instinctive muscular reaction,—that of his hat coming off as he greeted the stately little lady at his threshold and apologized for the sawdust on his floor which was compelling her to raise a froth of skirts above the tops of those sinful-looking shoes. I suspect that Miss Caroline was rather taken with Westley. She called him "my good man," which made him feel that he had been distinguished uncommonly, and she chatted with him