Behind
them came a line of other carriages in which were seated the magnates
of the town, including the office-holders and the prominent business
men. They all had that self-important air which is inseparable from
such shows and which denotes that the individual is feeling either like
a great man or a fool. Then came the militia battalion, a rather
shamefaced lot of young men who seemed to be painfully aware that they
were not at all real heroes like the soldiers in the carriages, but
merely make-believe imitations. The patriotic societies followed,
genuine and non-genuine, resplendent in "insignia," sashes, and badges.
"There's my wife, she's a G.C.M.C.T.C.," said Reddy proudly, pointing
out a very plain young woman with gold spectacles. "And here come the
Genuine Ancestors of Future Veterans. See that old woman there on the
other side? She made all the fuss. You see when anybody wants to get
into a society and finds they can't get in they go off and start
another. And some people that hadn't any tax collectors or connections
or anything, they just got up the 'Ancestors of Future Veterans,' and
everybody in town wanted to get into that. And old Miss Blunt there,
she wanted to come in too, and she's over seventy, and they said she
couldn't be an ancestor nohow, and she said she could and she would,
and they voted forty-one to forty against her, and the forty went off
and founded the Genuine Ancestors, and they're twice as big as the
others now.
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