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Polly Currier was one of the prettiest big girls in Cherryvale. Missy gazed at Pete, so handsome in his stylish-looking blue serge coat and sharply creased white ducks, debonairly twirling the bamboo walking-stick which the Cherryvale boys, half-enviously, twitted him about, and felt the wings of Romance whirring in the already complicated air.
The Methodist church in Cherryvale prided itself that it was not "new-fangled." It was not nearly so pretentious in appearance as was the Presbyterian church. Missy, in her heart, preferred stained-glass windows and their glorious reflections, as an asset to religion; but at night services you were not apt to note that deficiency.
Not "a saloon," but "the saloon!" Now, more frantically than she had urged him to pause, Tess implored Ben to proceed. No local standards are so hide-bound as those of a small town, and in Cherryvale it was not deemed decently permissible, but disgraceful, to have aught to do with liquor.
And with that slim child alone up there speaking these things so feelingly, it was easy for Cherryvale in the hushed and darkened auditorium to feel with her... Sometimes they pass oblivious of one another in the gloom; sometimes a signal flashes from out the darkness; a signal which is understood as though an intense ray pierced the enveloping pall and laid bare both souls.
Her words would be immortalized in print! and she would soar up and up... Some day, in the big magazines... Everybody would read her name there all Cherryvale and, perhaps, Ridgeley Holman Dobson would chance a brilliant, authoritative article on some deep, vital subject and wish to meet the author. She might even have to go to New York to live New York!
Missy was embroiled in a catastrophe, a tangle of embarrassments and odd complications. Aunt Nettie attributed the blame broadly to "that O'Neill girl"; she asserted that ever since Tess O'Neill had come to live in Cherryvale Missy had been "up to" just one craziness after another. But then Aunt Nettie was an old maid Missy couldn't imagine her as EVER having been fifteen years old.
Like Bill Cummings, the red-haired bank teller, who thought a trip to St. Louis an adventure to talk about for months! Or like old Mr. Siddons, or Professor Sutton, or the clerks in Mr. Bonner's store. In Cherryvale there was only this settled, humdrum kind of people. Of course there were the boys; Raymond was nice but you can't expect mere boys to be interesting.
She and Tess had agreed it would be best, till they'd "broke in" Cherryvale to the novelty of breeches, to keep to unfrequented roads. But it was the inconspicuousness of the route, the lack of an admiring audience, which gave birth to Missy's startling Idea. Back in the barn she'd felt self-conscious. But now she was getting used to her exposed legs. And doing really splendidly on Dr.
No one in Cherryvale ever got a word from Melissa about the true inwardness of the spiritual renaissance she experienced the winter that the Reverend MacGill came to the Methodist church; naturally not her father nor mother nor Aunt Nettie, because grown-ups, though nice and well-meaning, with their inability to "understand," and their tendency to laugh make one feel shy and reticent about the really deep and vital things.
Mother had heard already; father had telephoned from the office. Missy supposed all Cherryvale was telephoning but she deferred thoughts of her wider disgrace; at present mother was enough. Mother was fearfully angry Missy knew she would never understand. She said harsher things than she'd ever said before.
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