A universal perturbation followed her progress up the aisle, if she had
known it. She was small and fair, very daintily and beautifully made; a
pretty Marquise whose head Greuze. should have painted Mrs. Columbus
Landis, wife of the proprietor of the Palace Hotel, conferring with a lady
in the next seat, applied an over-burdened adjective: "It ain't so much
she's han'some, though she is, that--but don't you notice she's got a kind
of smart look to her? Her bein' so teeny, kind of makes it more so,
somehow, too." What stunned the gossips of the windows to awed admiration,
however, was the unconcerned and stoical fashion in which she wore a long
bodkin straight through her head. It seemed a large sacrifice merely to
make sure one's hat remained in place.

The party took seats a little to the left and rear of the lecturer's
table, and faced the audience. The strange lady chatted gaily with the
other three, apparently as unconscious of the multitude of eyes fixed upon
her as the gazers were innocent of rude intent. There were pretty young
women in Plattville; Minnie Briscoe was the prettiest, and, as the local
glass of fashion reflected, "the stylishest"; but this girl was different,
somehow, in a way the critics were puzzled to discover--different, from
the sparkle of her eyes and the crown of her trim sailor hat, to the edge
of her snowy duck skirt.

Judd Bennett sighed a sigh that was heard in every corner of the room. As
everybody immediately turned to look at him, he got up and went out.

It had long been a jocose fiction of Mr. Martin, who was a widower of
thirty years' standing, that he and the gifted authoress by his side were
in a state of courtship. Now he bent his rugged head toward her to
whisper: "I never thought to see the day you'd have a rival in my
affections. Miss Seliny, but yonder looks like it. I reckon I'll have to