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The villagers immediately attributed a duplicity to Nessie's year-long church and Sunday-school going. "What hypocrisy!" they said. "The pretence she's been making!" Naturally, they could never suspect that the same emotional trait which caused her to tithe and give herself profoundly to religious observances might be transposed into as equally complete surrender to a lover. No one imagined she had remained consistent in character, so each village group readjusted itself to this new or "real" character which the girl had discovered.

When Mrs. Roxie Biggers heard the scandal, she was moved to take some instant action about it, as was her wont. Mrs. Roxie was sewing some sheets which she meant to give to a labourer's wife who had been brought down with puerperal fever. She had begged enough cloth from the stores to make four sheets, and she meant to keep two of them for her own use.

Now without looking up from the clatter of her sewing machine she spoke to the neighbour who was making an afternoon call upon her.

"It's the hypocrisy of the thing!" she denounced, glaring at her seam with thin, widely spread nostrils, "Going prissing down to my brother Perry's Sunday-school ever' Sunday; out to prayer meetin'; then to church; then workin' among sinners in the revival; and now turned out to be a strumpet! What will Brother Perry think!"

The caller at the Bigger's home, a Mrs. Gumerton, was a heavy, slow-motioned woman who went right on with the tally of her gossip entirely disregarding the angry ejaculations of her hostess.

"Kissed him right down there at the station before ever'body!"

"Shameless baggage, advertisin' her sin! Flauntin' it in our faces!"

"Mister Bagley—you know Mister Bagley, the freight agent—he said they simply clung to each other—kissed fer three or four minutes. . . ."