to buy her Joe's special brand of corn salve and bunion plaster.

And so it is all the way down Main Street. In the gents' furnishings'
corner of Peter Sweeney's dry-goods store Seth Curtis is buying a new
hat, a little jaunty hat that seems to fit his head well enough but
doesn't somehow become the rest of him. Seth looks best in a cap and
always wears one except, of course, on such state occasions as the
coming one. He asks the Longman boys how he looks in the brown fedora
Pete has just put on his head and Max Longman laughs and wants to know
what difference it makes how a married man with a bald spot looks.
Then he turns away to pick out carefully the kind of tie that will make
him most pleasing in Clara's sight on the morrow.

In the ladies' department of that same store Jocelyn Brownlee is asking
for long, white silk gloves. A little hush falls on the crowd of
feminine shoppers as Mrs. Pete gets the stepladder, mounts it and
brings down with a good deal of visible pride a pasteboard box
containing six pairs of white silk gloves that Pete bought three years
ago in a moment of incomprehensible madness, a thing which Mrs. Pete
has never until this minute forgiven him.

Jocelyn, pretty, eager, unaffected, selects the very first pair and is
wholly unconscious of the stir she has made. It is only when David
Allan comes up and asks her if she is ready that she becomes confused
and conscious of the watching eyes of the other buyers.

She has promised to go to the Decoration Day exercises with David and
has hurried to buy gloves for the occasion not knowing, in her city
innocence, that gloves aren't the style in Green Valley, leastways not
for any outdoor festival.