People who had been in the habit of devoting a day or two to cleaning up a year’s social debts and went up and down the streets dropping doleful calls like wreaths on headstones, walked in unannounced of mornings.  It was now Mrs. Budlong that had to keep dressed up all day.  Everybody accepted the inevitable invitations to have a cup of tea, till the cook struck.  Cook said she had conthracted to cuke for a small family, not to run a continurous bairbecue.  Besides she had to answer the doorbell so much she couldn’t get her hands into the dough, before they were out again.  And dinner was never ready.  The amount of tea consumed and bakery cake and the butter, began to alarm Mrs. Budlong.  And Carthage people were so nervous at taking tea with a millionairess that they kept dropping cups or setting saucers down too hard.

Mrs. Budlong had never a moment the whole day long to leave the house, and she suddenly found herself without a call returned.  She had so many invitations to dinners and luncheons, that her life became a hop, skip and jump.

During the first ecstasy of the good news, Mrs. Budlong had raved over the places she was going to travel,—­Paris (now pronounced Paree), London, Vienna, St. Marks, the Lion of Lucerne—­she talked like a handbook of Cook’s Tours.  To successive callers she told the story over and over till the rhapsody finally palled on her own tongue.  She began to hate Paree, London, Vienna, St. Marks, and to loathe the Lion of Lucerne.  All she wanted to do was to get out of town to some quiet retreat.  Carthage was no longer quiet.  It simmered to the boiling-over point.

Once it had been Mrs. Budlong’s pride to be the social leader of Carthage.  Now that her husband was worth (or to be worth) a hundred thousand dollars Carthage seemed a very petty parish to be the social leader of.  She began to read New York society notes with expectancy, as one cons the Baedeker of a town one is approaching.

She lay awake nights wondering what she should wear at Mrs. Stuyvesant Square’s next party and at Mrs. Astor House’s sociable.  She fretted the choice whether she should take a letter from her church to St. Bartholomew’s or to Grace or St. John’s the Divine’s.  And all the while she was pouring tea for the wives of harness makers and druggists, dentists and grocers.

The more reason for not appearing before them in the same clothes incessantly.  But with a dinner or a reception or a tea or a ball every night, her two dressy-up dresses became so familiar that at one party when she was coming downstairs from laying off her cloak people spoke to her dress before they could see her face.  And she could hardly afford to get new clothes, for after all she had not come into the money.  She had just come at it, or toward it; or as her husband began to say, tip against it.

Mr. Budlong was kept on such tenterhooks by lawyers and papers to sign, titles to clear, executors and executrices to consult, and waivers, deeds, indentures and things that he had no time for his regular business.