In this charitable undertaking she was aided and abetted by her father, who indulgently paid the bills. At her instigation he built an imposing red brick mansion on the sloping shore of Lake Minnedaska, named it--or suffered her to name it--"Mereside," had an artist of parts up from Chicago to design the decorations and superintend the furnishings, had a landscape gardener from Philadelphia to lay out the grounds, and, when all was in readiness, gave a house-warming to which the invitations were in some sense mandatory, since by that time he had a finger in nearly every commercial and industrial pie in Wahaska.
After the house-warming, which was a social event quite without precedent in Wahaskan annals, Miss Grierson's leadership was tacitly acknowledged by a majority of the ex-farmers' wives and daughters, though they still discussed her with more or less frankness in the sewing-circles and at neighborhood tea-drinkings. Crystallized into accusation, there was little to be urged against her save that she was pretty and rich, and that her leaning toward modernity was sometimes a little startling. But being human, the missionary seamstresses and the tea-drinkers made the most of these drawbacks, whetting criticism to a cutting edge now and then with curious speculations about Margery's mother, and wondering why Jasper Grierson or the daughter never mentioned her.
Meanwhile, the big house on the lake front continued to set the social pace. Afternoon teas began to supersede the sewing-circles; not a few of the imitators attained to the formal dignity of visiting cards with "Wednesdays" or "Thursdays" appearing in neat script in the lower left-hand corner; and in some of the more advanced households the principal meal of the day drifted from its noontide anchorage to unwonted moorings among the evening hours--greatly to the distress of the men, for whom even hot weather was no longer an excuse for appearing in shirt-sleeves.
For these innovations Miss Grierson was indirectly, though not less intentionally, responsible; and her satisfaction was in just proportion to the results attained. But in spite of these successes there were still obstacles to be surmounted. From the first there had been a perverse minority refusing stubbornly to bow the head in the house of--Grierson. The Farnhams were of it, and the Raymers, with a following of a few of the families called "old" as age is reckoned in the Middle West. The men of this minority were slow to admit the omnipotence of Jasper Grierson's money, and the women were still slower to accept Miss Grierson on terms of social equality.
