uselessness; but Mrs. Munger insisted, and carried her off down the village
street.

The air sparkled full of sun, and a breeze from the south-west frolicked
with the twinkling leaves of the overarching elms, and made their shadows
dance on the crisp roadway, packed hard by the rain, and faced with clean
sand, which crackled pleasantly under Mrs. Munger's phaeton wheels. She
talked incessantly. "I think we'll go first to Mrs. Gerrish's, and then to
Mrs. Wilmington's. You know them?"

"Oh yes; they were old girl friends."

"Then you know why I go to Mrs. Gerrish's first. She'll care a great deal,
and Mrs. Wilmington won't care at all. She's a delicious creature, Mrs.
Wilmington--don't you think? That large, indolent nature; Mr. Brandreth
says she makes him think of 'the land in which it seemed always
afternoon.'"

Annie remembered Lyra Goodman as a long, lazy, red-haired girl who laughed
easily; and she could not readily realise her in the character of a
Titian-esque beauty with a gift for humorous dramatics, which she had
filled out into during the years of her absence from Hatboro'; but she said
"Oh yes," in the necessity of polite acquiescence, and Mrs. Munger went on
talking--

"She's the only one of the Old Hatboro' people, so far as I know them, who
has any breadth of view. Whoa!" She pulled up suddenly beside a stout,
short lady in a fashionable walking dress, who was pushing an elegant
perambulator with one hand, and shielding her complexion with a crimson
sun-umbrella in the other.