ed visiting stranger. And now she
had no need to invite people to return their calls. They came
spontaneously. Sometimes there were a dozen calling at once. It was a
reception every day. There were overflow meetings in the room which
Mrs. Budlong called Mr. Budlong's "den." This was the place where she
kept the furniture that she didn't dare keep in the parlor.

People who had never come to see her in spite of her prehensile
telephone, dropped in to pay up some musty old call that had lain
unreturned for years. People who had always come formally, even
funereally, rushed in as informally and with as devouring an enthusiasm
as old chums. People who used to run in informally now drove up in
vehicles from MacMulkin's livery stable; or if they came in their own
turn-outs they had the tops washed and the harness polished, and the
gardener and furnaceman who drove, had his hat brushed, was not allowed
to smoke, and was urged to sit up straight and for heaven's sake to
keep his foot off the dashboard.

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,