Eastridge Banner, and that the town ought to feel very much honored. My
wife suppressed her conviction that this was the correct view of the
case, in a deprecatory expression of our happiness in finding ourselves
in Eastridge, and our entire satisfaction with our prospects and
surroundings. Then Mrs. Talbert's mother inquired, as delicately as
possible, what denominations, religious and medical, we were of, how
many children we had, and whether mostly boys or girls, and where and
how long we had been married. She was glad, she said, that we had taken
the place next them, after our brief sojourn in the furnished house
where we had first lived, and said that there was only one objection to
the locality, which was the prevalence of moths; they obliged you to
put away your things in naphtha-balls almost the moment the spring
opened. She wished to know what books my wife was presently reading,
and whether she approved of women's clubs to the extent that they were
carried to in some places. She believed in book clubs, but to her mind
it was very questionable whether the time that ladies gave to writing
papers on so many different subjects was well spent. She thought it a
pity that so many things were canned, nowadays, and so well canned that
the old arts of pickling and preserving were almost entirely lost. In
the conversation, where she bore a leading part as long as she remained
in the room, her mind took a wide range, and visited more human
interests than my wife was at first able to mention, though afterward
she remembered so many that I formed the notion of something
encyclopedic in its compass. When she reached the letter Z, she rose
and took leave of my wife, saying that now she must go and lie down, as
it appeared to be her invariable custom to do (in behalf of the robust
health which she had inherited unimpaired from a New England ancestry),
at exactly half-past four every afternoon. It was this, she said, more
than any one thing that enabled her to go through so much as she did;
but through the door which she left open behind her my wife heard