Where Balderson went after leaving town no one seems to know. The earth might have swallowed him up. But in 1882 someone sent a marked copy of the _Denver Tribune_ to the _Statesman_ office, the _Statesman_ reprinted it, and "Aunt" Martha filed it away in her book. Here is it:
"Big Burro Springs, Colorado, September 7th (Special).--Three men were killed yesterday in a fight between the men at Jingle-bob ranch and a surveying party under A. P. Balderson. The Balderson party consisted of four men, among whom was "Rowdy" Joe Nevison, the famous marshal of Leoti, Kansas. They were locating a reservoir site which Balderson has taken up on Burro Creek for the Balderson Irrigation Company and for supplying the Look Out Townsite Company with water. These are Balderson"s schemes, and, if established, will put the Jingle-bob ranch people out of business, as they have no t.i.tle to the land on which they are operating. The remarkable part of the fight is that which Balderson took in it. After two of his men had been killed and the owner of the Jingle-bob ranch had fallen, Balderson and his two remaining men came forward with hands up, waving handkerchiefs. The Jingle-bob people recognised the flag of truce, and Balderson led his men across the creek to the cow-camp. Just as he approached close enough to the man who had the party covered, Balderson yelled, "Watch out--back of you!" and, as all the captors turned their heads, Balderson knocked the pistol from the hand of the only man whose weapon was pointed at the Balderson party, and the next moment the cow-men looked into the barrels of the surveyors" three revolvers, and were told that if they budged a hair they would be killed. Balderson then disarmed the cow-men, and, after pa.s.sing around the drinks, hired the outfit as policemen for the town of Look Out. It is said that he has given them two thousand dollars apiece in Irrigation Company stock, has promised to defend them if they are charged with the murder of the two surveyors, and has given each cow-man a deed to a corner lot on the public square of the prospective Balderson town. Deputy Sheriff Crosby from this place went over to arrest Balderson, charged with killing D. V. Sherman of the Jingle-bob property, and, after asking for his warrant, Balderson took it, put it in his pocket, advised the deputy to hurry home, and, if he found any coyotes or jack-rabbits that couldn"t get out of his way fast enough, not to stop to kill them, but shoo them off the trail and save time."
They say in Colorado that Balderson became an irrigation king. It is certain that he raised half a million dollars in New York for his dam and ditches. He built the "Look Out Opera House," and decorated it in gilded stucco and with red plush two inches deep. Morrison contributed this anecdote to the office Legend of Balderson: "He was in Florida in his private car when they finished the opera house. When he came back and saw a plaster bust of Shakespeare over the proscenium arch, he waved his cane pompously and exclaimed: "Take her down! Bill Shakespeare is all right for the effete East, but out here he ain"t deuce high with the little corporal of Company B."" So in Shakespeare"s niche is a plaster-cast of a soldier"s face with the slouch-cap, the military moustache, and the goatee of great pride, after the picture that once adorned the columns of the _Statesman_. For a time they talked of Balderson for United States Senator, and, at the laying of the corner-stone of the capitol, the Denver papers spoke of the masterly oration of former Governor Balderson of Kansas, whose marvellous word-painting of the Battle of Look Out Mountain held the vast audience spellbound for an hour. A few months later a cloudburst carried away the Big Burro dam, and times went bad, and the stockholders in Balderson"s company, who would have rebuilt the dam, could not find Balderson when they needed him, and certain creditors of the company, hitherto unknown, appeared, and Balderson faded away like a morning star.
Here is a part of the narrative that George Kirwin got from Joe Nevison: Joe began with the coal strike at Castle Rock, Wyoming, in 1893, when the strikers ma.s.sed on Flat Top Mountain and day after day went through their drill. He told a highly dramatic story of the stoutish little man of fifty-five, with a fat, smooth-shaven face, who pounded that horde of angry men into some semblance of military order.
All day the little man, in his shrunken seersucker coat and greasy white hat, would bark orders at the men, march and counter-march them, and go through the manual of arms, backward and forward and seven hands round.
When the battle with the militia came, the strikers charged down Flat Top and fought bravely. The little man in the seersucker coat stayed with them, snapping orders at them, d.a.m.ning them, coaxing them. And when the deputies gathered up the strikers for the trial in court two months later, the little man was still there. He was prospecting on a gopher-hole somewhere up in the hills, and was trying to get his wildcat mine listed on the Salt Lake Mining Exchange. No one gave bond for the little man in the seersucker coat, and he went to jail. He was Balderson. He seemed to give little heed to the trial, and sat with the strikers rather stolidly. Venire after venire of jurymen was gone through. At last an old man wearing a Loyal Legion b.u.t.ton went into the jury-box. Balderson saw him; they exchanged recognising glances, and Balderson turned scarlet and looked away quickly. He nudged an attorney for the strikers and said: "Keep him, whatever you do."
After the evidence was all in and the attorneys were about to make their arguments, Balderson and one of the lawyers for the strikers were alone.
"They told me to take the part about you, Balderson; you were in the Union Army, weren"t you?"
Balderson looked at the floor and said:
"Yes; but don"t say anything about it."
The lawyer, who knew Balderson"s record, was astonished. He had made his whole speech up on the line that Balderson as an old soldier would appeal to the sympathies of the jury. Over and over the lawyer pressed Balderson to know why nothing should be said of his soldier record, and finally in exasperation the lawyer broke out:
"Lookee here, Baldy; you"re too old to get coy. I"m going to make my speech as I"ve mapped it out, soldier racket and all. I guess you"ve taken enough trips up Look Out Mountain to get used to the alt.i.tude by this time."
The lawyer started away, but Balderson grabbed him and pulled him back.
"Don"t do it; for G.o.d"s sake, don"t do it! There"s a fellow on that jury that"s a G. A. R. man; we were soldiers together; he knows me from away back. Talk of Iowy; talk of Kansas; talk of anything on G.o.d"s green earth, but don"t talk soldier. That man would wade through h.e.l.l for me neck deep on any other basis than that." Balderson"s voice was quivering. He added: "But don"t talk soldier." Balderson slumped, with his head in his hands. The attorney snapped at him:
"Weren"t you a soldier?"
"Yes; oh, yes," Balderson sighed.
"Didn"t you go up Look Out Mountain?"
"Oh, yes--that, too."
There was a silence between the men. The lawyer rasped it with, "Well, what then?"
"Well--well," and the tousled little man sighed so deeply his sigh was almost a sob, and lifted up the eyes of a whipped dog to the lawyer"s--"after that I got in the commissary department--and--and--was dishonourably discharged." He rubbed his eyes with his fingers a moment and then grinned foxily: "Ain"t that enough?"
Roosevelt is a mining-camp in Idaho. It is five days from a morning paper, and the camp is new. It is a log town with one street and no society, except such as may gather around the big box-stove at Johnnie Conyer"s saloon. A number of ladies and two women lived in the camp, a few tin-horn "gents," and about two hundred men. It is a seven months"
snow-camp, where men take their drama canned in the phonograph, their food canned, their medicine all out of one bottle, and their morals "without benefit of clergy." Across the front of one of the canvas-covered log store-rooms that fringe the single street a cloth sign is stretched. It reads, "Department Store," and inside a dance hall, a saloon, and a gambling-place are operating. A few years ago, when Colonel Alphabetical Morrison was travelling through the West on a land deal for John Markley, business took him to Roosevelt, and he found Balderson, grey of beard, shiny of pate, with unkempt, ratty back hair; he was watery-eyed, and his red-veined skin had slipped down from his once fat face into draperies over his lean neck and jowls. He was in the dealer"s chair, running the game.
The statute of limitations had covered all his Kansas misdeeds, and he nodded affably as his old acquaintance came in. Later in the day the two men went to Mrs. Smith"s boarding-house to take a social bite. They sat in front of the log-house in the evening, Balderson mellow and reminiscent.
"Seems to me this way: I ain"t cut out for society as it is organised. I do all right in a town until the piano begins to get respectable and the rules of order are tucked snugly inside the decalogue, then I slip my belt, and my running gear doesn"t track. I get a few grand and n.o.ble thoughts, freeze to "em, and later find that the hereditary appurtenances thereunto appertaining are private property of someone else, and there is nothing for me to do but to stand a lawsuit or vanish. I have had bad luck, lost my money, lost my friends, lost my conscience, lost everything, pretty near"--and here he turned his watery eyes on his friend with a saw-toothed smile and shook his depleted abdomen, that had been worn off climbing many hills--"I"ve lost everything, pretty near, but my vermiform appendix and my table of contents, and as like as not I"ll find some feller"s got them copyrighted." He heaved a great sigh and resumed, "I suppose I could "a"
stood it all well enough if I had just had some sort of faith, some religious consolation, some creed, or G.o.d, or something." He sighed again, and then leered up: "But, you know--I"m so d.a.m.ned skeptic!"
Last spring, according to the Boise, Idaho, papers, "Governor" Balderson and two other old soldiers celebrated Memorial Day in Roosevelt. They got a muslin flag as big as the flap of a shirt, from heaven knows where, and in the streets of Roosevelt they hoisted this flag on the highest pine pole in all the Salmon River Mountains. There were elaborate ceremonies, and to the miners and gamblers and keepers of wildcat mines in the mountains a.s.sembled, "Governor" Balderson told eloquently of the Battle of Look Out Mountain. And Colonel Morrison who read the account smiled appreciatively and pointed out to us the exact stage in the proceedings where Balderson demanded to know who carried the flag. There was long and tumultuous applause at the climax.
We also read in the Boise papers that at the fall election in Roosevelt they made Balderson justice of the peace, which, as Colonel Morrison explained, was a purely honorary office in a community where every man is his own court and constable and jury and judge; but the Colonel said that Balderson was proud of official distinction, and probably levied mild tribute from the people who indulged in riotous living, by compelling them to buy drink-checks redeemable only at his department store.
It was from the Boise papers that we had the final word from Balderson.
A message came to Roosevelt this spring that an outfit, thirty miles away at the head of Profile Creek, was sick and starving. It was a dangerous trip to the rescue, for snowslides were booming on every southern hillside. Death would literally play tag with the man who dared to hit the trail for Profile. Balderson did not hesitate a moment, but filled his pack with provisions, put a marked deck and some loaded dice in his pocket, and waved Roosevelt a cheery good-by as he struck out over the three logs that bridge Mule Creek. He was bundled to the chin in warm coats, and on his way met Hot Foot Higgins coming in from Profile. Balderson seems to have given Higgins his warmest coat before the snow-slide hit them. It killed them both. Hot Foot died instantly, but Balderson must have lived many hours, for the snow about his body was melted and in his pocket they found Hot Foot"s watch.
They buried him near the trail where they found him, and, stuck in a candle-box, over the heap of stones above him, flutters lonesomely in the desolation of the mountain-side the little muslin rag that was once a flag. They call the hill on which he sleeps "Look Out Mountain."
Late this spring the mail brought to the office of the Boise _Capital-News_ a battered woodcut half a century old. When the _News_ came to our office we saw the familiar soldier"s face in profile, with a cap drawn over the eyes, with a waving moustache and a fierce goatee, and across the shoulders of the figure a military cape thrown back jauntily. With the old cut in the Boise paper was an article which the editor says in a note was written in a young woman"s angular handwriting, done in pencil on wrapping-paper. The article told, in spelling unspeakable, of the greatness and goodness of "Ex-Governor Balderson of Kansas." It related that he was ever the "friend to the friendless"; that, "with all his worldly honours, he was modest and una.s.suming"; that "he had his faults, as who of us have not," but that he was "honest, tried and true"; and the memorial closed with the words: "Heaven"s angel gained is Roosevelt"s hero lost."
XIV
The Pa.s.sing of Priscilla Winthrop
What a dreary waste life in our office must have been before Miss Larrabee came to us to edit a society page for the paper! To be sure we had known in a vague way that there were lines of social cleavage in the town; that there were whist clubs and dancing clubs and women"s clubs, and in a general way that the women who composed these clubs made up our best society, and that those benighted souls beyond the pale of these clubs were out of the caste. We knew that certain persons whose names were always handed in on the lists of guests at parties were what we called "howling swells." But it remained for Miss Larrabee to sort out ten or a dozen of these "howling swells" who belonged to the strictest social caste in town, and call them "howling dervishes." Incidentally it may be said that both Miss Larrabee and her mother were dervishes, but that did not prevent her from making sport of them. From Miss Larrabee we learned that the high priestess of the howling dervishes of our society was Mrs. Mortimer Conklin, known by the sisterhood of the mosque as Priscilla Winthrop. We in our office had never heard her called by that name, but Miss Larrabee explained, rather elaborately, that unless one was permitted to speak of Mrs. Conklin thus, one was quite beyond the hope of a social heaven.
In the first place, Priscilla Winthrop was Mrs. Conklin"s maiden name; in the second place, it links her with the Colonial Puritan stock of which she is so justly proud--being scornful of mere Daughters of the Revolution--and finally, though Mrs. Conklin is a grandmother, her maiden name seems to preserve the sweet, vague illusion of girlhood which Mrs. Conklin always carries about her like the shadow of a dream.
And Miss Larrabee punctuated this with a wink which we took to be a quotation mark, and she went on with her work. So we knew we had been listening to the language used in the temple.
Our town was organised fifty years ago by Abolitionists from New England, and twenty years ago, when Alphabetical Morrison was getting out one of the numerous boom editions of his real estate circular, he printed an historical article therein in which he said that Priscilla Winthrop was the first white child born on the town site. Her father was territorial judge, afterward member of the State Senate, and after ten years spent in mining in the far West, died in the seventies, the richest man in the State. It was known that he left Priscilla, his only child, half a million dollars in government bonds.
She was the first girl in our town to go away to school. Naturally, she went to Oberlin, famous in those days for admitting coloured students.
But she finished her education at Va.s.sar, and came back so much of a young lady that the town could hardly contain her. She married Mortimer Conklin, took him to the Centennial on a wedding trip, came home, rebuilt her father"s house, covering it with towers and minarets and steeples, and scroll-saw fretwork, and christened it Winthrop Hall. She erected a store building on Main Street, that Mortimer might have a luxurious office on the second floor, and then settled down to the serious business of life, which was building up a t.i.tled aristocracy in a Kansas town.
The Conklin children were never sent to the public schools, but had a governess, yet Mortimer Conklin, who was always alert for the call, could not understand why the people never summoned him to any office of honour or trust. He kept his bra.s.s signboard polished, went to his office punctually every morning at ten o"clock, and returned home to dinner at five, and made clients wait ten minutes in the outer office before they could see him--at least so both of them say, and there were no others in all the years. He shaved every day, wore a frock-coat and a high hat to church--where for ten years he was the only male member of the Episcopalian flock--and Mrs. Conklin told the women that altogether he was a credit to his s.e.x and his family--a remark which was pa.s.sed about ribaldly in town for a dozen years, though Mortimer Conklin never knew that he was the subject of a town joke. Once he rebuked a man in the barber shop for speaking of feminine extravagance, and told the shop that he did not stint his wife, that when she asked him for money he always gave it to her without question, and that if she wanted a dress he told her to buy it and send the bill to him. And we are such a polite people that no one in the crowded shop laughed--until Mortimer Conklin went out.
Of course at the office we have known for twenty-five years what the men thought of Mortimer, but not until Miss Larrabee joined the force did we know that among the women Mrs. Conklin was considered an oracle. Miss Larrabee said that her mother has a legend that when Priscilla Winthrop brought home from Boston the first sealskin sacque ever worn in town she gave a party for it, and it lay in its box on the big walnut bureau in the spare room of the Conklin mansion in solemn state, while seventy-five women salaamed to it. After that Priscilla Winthrop was the town authority on sealskins. When any member of the town n.o.bility had a new sealskin, she took it humbly to Priscilla Winthrop to pa.s.s judgment upon it. If Priscilla said it was London-dyed, its owner pranced away on clouds of glory; but if she said it was American-dyed, its owner crawled away in shame, and when one admired the disgraced garment, the martyred owner smiled with resigned sweetness and said humbly: "Yes--but it"s only American-dyed, you know."
No dervish ever questioned the curse of the priestess. The only time a revolt was imminent was in the autumn of 1884 when the Conklins returned from their season at Duxbury, Ma.s.sachusetts, and Mrs. Conklin took up the carpets in her house, heroically sold all of them at the second-hand store, put in new waxed floors and spread down rugs. The town uprose and hooted; the outcasts and barbarians in the Methodist and Baptist Missionary Societies rocked the Conklin home with their merriment, and ten dervishes with set faces bravely met the onslaughts of the savages; but among themselves in hushed whispers, behind locked doors, the faithful wondered if there was not a mistake some place. However, when Priscilla Winthrop a.s.sured them that in all the best homes in Boston rugs were replacing carpets, their souls were at peace.
All this time we at the office knew nothing of what was going on. We knew that the Conklins devoted considerable time to society; but Alphabetical Morrison explained that by calling attention to the fact that Mrs. Conklin had prematurely grey hair. He said a woman with prematurely grey hair was as sure to be a social leader as a spotted horse is to join a circus. But now we know that Colonel Morrison"s view was a superficial one, for he was probably deterred from going deeper into the subject by his dislike for Mortimer Conklin, who invested a quarter of a million dollars of the Winthrop fortune in the Wichita boom, and lost it. Colonel Morrison naturally thought as long as Conklin was going to lose that money he could have lost it just as well at home in the "Queen City of the Prairies," giving the Colonel a chance to win.
And when Conklin, protecting his equities in Wichita, sent a hundred thousand dollars of good money after the quarter million of bad money, Colonel Morrison"s grief could find no words; though he did find language for his wrath. When the Conklins draped their Oriental rugs for airing every Sat.u.r.day over the veranda and portico railings of the house front, Colonel Morrison accused the Conklins of hanging out their stamp collection to let the neighbours see it. This was the only side of the rug question we ever heard in our office until Miss Larrabee came; then she told us that one of the first requirements of a howling dervish was to be able to quote from Priscilla Winthrop"s Rug book from memory.
The Rug book, the China book and the Old Furniture book were the three sacred scrolls of the sect.
All this was news to us. However, through Colonel Morrison, we had received many years ago another sidelight on the social status of the Conklins. It came out in this way: Time honoured custom in our town allows the children of a home where there is an outbreak of social revelry, whether a church festival or a meeting of the Cold-Nosed Whist Club, to line up with the neighbour children on the back stoop or in the kitchen, like human vultures, waiting to lick the ice-cream freezer and to devour the bits of cake and chicken salad that are left over. Colonel Morrison told us that no child was ever known to adorn the back yard of the Conklin home while a social cataclysm was going on, but that when Mrs. Morrison entertained the Ladies" Literary League, children from the holy Conklin family went home from his back porch with their faces smeared with chicken croquettes and their hands sticky with jellycake.
This story never gained general circulation in town, but even if it had been known of all men it would not have shaken the faith of the devotees. For they did not smile when Priscilla Winthrop began to refer to old Frank Hagan, who came to milk the Conklin cow and curry the Conklin horse, as "Francois, the man," or to call the girl who did the cooking and general housework "Cosette, the maid," though every one of the dozen other women in town whom "Cosette, the maid" had worked for knew that her name was f.a.n.n.y Ropes. And shortly after that the homes of the rich and the great over on the hill above Main Street began to fill with Lisettes and Nanons and Fanchons, and Mrs. Julia Neal Worthington called her girl "Grisette," explaining that they had always had a Grisette about the house since her mother first went to housekeeping in Peoria, Illinois, and it sounded so natural to hear the name that they always gave it to a new servant. This story came to the office through the Young Prince, who chuckled over it during the whole hour he consumed in writing Ezra Worthington"s obituary.
Miss Larrabee says that the death of Ezra Worthington marks such a distinct epoch in the social life of the town that we must set down here--even if the narrative of the Conklins halts for a moment--how the Worthingtons rose and flourished. Julia Neal, eldest daughter of Thomas Neal--who lost the "O" before his name somewhere between the docks of Dublin and the west bank of the Missouri River--was for ten years princ.i.p.al of the ward school in that part of our town known as "Arkansaw," where her term of service is still remembered as the "reign of terror." It was said of her then that she could whip any man in the ward--and would do it if he gave her a chance. The same manner which made the neighbours complain that Julia Neal carried her head too high, later in life, when she had money to back it, gave her what the women of the State Federation called a "regal air." In her early thirties she married Ezra Worthington, bachelor, twenty year her senior. Ezra Worthington was at that time, had been for twenty years before, and continued to be until his death, proprietor of the Worthington Poultry and Produce Commission Company. He was owner of the stock-yards, president of the Worthington State Bank, vice-president, treasurer and general manager of the Worthington Mercantile Company, and owner of five brick buildings on Main Street. He bought one suit of clothes every five years whether he needed it or not, never let go of a dollar until the G.o.ddess of Liberty on it was black in the face, and died rated "As $350,000" by all the commercial agencies in the country. And the first thing Mrs. Worthington did after the funeral was to telephone to the bank and ask them to send her a hundred dollars.
The next important thing she did was to put a heavy, immovable granite monument over the deceased so that he would not be restless, and then she built what is known in our town as the Worthington Palace. It makes the Markley mansion which cost $25,000 look like a barn. The Worthingtons in the lifetime of Ezra had ventured no further into the social whirl of the town than to entertain the new Presbyterian preacher at tea, and to lend their lawn to the King"s Daughters for a social, sending a bill in to the society for the eggs used in the coffee and the gasoline used in heating it.
To the howling dervishes who surrounded Priscilla Winthrop the Worthingtons were as mere Christian dogs. It was not until three years after Ezra Worthington"s death that the glow of the rising Worthington sun began to be seen in the Winthrop mosque. During those three years Mrs. Worthington had bought and read four different sets of the best hundred books, had consumed the Chautauqua course, had prepared and delivered for the Social Science Club, which she organised, five papers ranging in subject from the home life of Rameses I., through a Survey of the Forces Dominating Michael Angelo, to the Influence of Esoteric Buddhism on Modern Political Tendencies. More than that, she had been elected president of the City Federation of Clubs, and, being a delegate to the National Federation from the State, was talked of for the State Federation Presidency. When the State Federation met in our town, Mrs.
Worthington gave a reception for the delegates in the Worthington Palace, a feature of which was a concert by a Kansas City organist on the new pipe-organ which she had erected in the music-room of her house, and despite the fact that the devotees of the Priscilla shrine said that the crowd was distinctly mixed and not at all representative of our best social grace and elegance, there is no question but that Mrs.
Worthington"s reception made a strong impression upon the best local society. The fact that, as Miss Larrabee said, "Priscilla Winthrop was so nice about it," also may be regarded as ominous. But the women who lent Mrs. Worthington the spoons and forks for the occasion were delighted, and formed a phalanx about her, which made up in numbers what it might have lacked in distinction. Yet while Mrs. Worthington was in Europe the faithful routed the phalanx, and Mrs. Conklin returned from her summer in Duxbury with half a carload of old furniture from Harrison Sampson"s shop and gave a talk to the priestesses of the inner temple on "Heppelwhite in New England."
Miss Larrabee reported the affair for our paper, giving the small list of guests and the long line of refreshments--which included alligator-pear salad, right out of the Smart Set Cook Book. Moreover, when Jefferson appeared in Topeka that fall, Priscilla Winthrop, who had met him through some of her Duxbury friends in Boston, invited him to run down for a luncheon with her and the members of the royal family who surrounded her. It was the proud boast of the defenders of the Winthrop faith in town that week, that though twenty-four people sat down to the table, not only did all the men wear frock-coats--not only did Uncle Charlie Haskins of String Town wear the old Winthrop butler"s livery without a wrinkle in it, and with only the faint odour of mothb.a.l.l.s to mingle with the perfume of the roses--but (and here the voices of the followers of the prophet dropped in awe) not a single knife or fork or spoon or napkin was borrowed! After that, when any of the sisterhood had occasion to speak of the absent Mrs. Worthington, whose house was filled with new mahogany and bra.s.s furniture, they referred to her as the d.u.c.h.ess of Grand Rapids, which gave them much comfort.
But joy is short-lived. When Mrs. Worthington came back from Europe and opened her house to the City Federation, and gave a coloured lantern-slide lecture on "An evening with the Old Masters," serving punch from her own cut-gla.s.s punch bowl instead of renting the hand-painted crockery bowl of the queensware store, the old dull pain came back into the hearts of the dwellers in the inner circle. Then just in the nick of time Mrs. Conklin went to Kansas City and was operated on for appendicitis. She came back pale and interesting, and gave her club a paper called "Hospital Days," fragrant with iodoform and Henley"s poems. Miss Larrabee told us that it was almost as pleasant as an operation on one"s self to hear Mrs. Conklin tell about hers. And they thought it was rather brutal--so Miss Larrabee afterward told us--when Mrs. Worthington went to the hospital one month, and gave her famous Delsarte lecture course the next month, and explained to the women that if she wasn"t as heavy as she used to be it was because she had had everything cut out of her below the windpipe. It seemed to the temple priestesses that, considering what a serious time poor dear Priscilla Winthrop had gone through, Mrs. Worthington was making light of serious things.